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PRACTICAL PARADOXES 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES 



TRUTH IN CONTRADICTIONS 






BY 

H, CLAY TRUMBULL 




PHILADELPHIA 

JOHN D. WATTLES, Publisher 

1889 



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Copyright, 1889 

BY 

H, CLAY TRUMBULL 



IZ- Vf6' 




PREFACE. 



Lessons from one man's experiences and 
observations will not be of value to all. But 
lessons from any man's experiences and ob- 
servations will be of value to some. No man 
stands, in his feelings and sympathies, for his 
entire race. But every man, in his sympa- 
thies and feelings, stands for a class. 

Hence it is, that whatever truths have made 
a profound impression on a man in the prog- 
ress of his life-course are likely to make a 
correspondent impression on others who are 
like him, if he can bring those truths with 
any vividness before them. And when a 
series of related truths have excited interest 
in their detached separateness, they will 
hardly fail to excite fresh interest in their 
exhibited relation to one another and to a 
common central truth. 

5 



6 PREFACE. 

The essays in this volume are an outcome 
of their writer's observings and experien- 
cings in his varied life-course. They were 
received with interest as editorial contribu- 
tions in the pages of The Sunday School 
Times, while appearing there, one by one, 
during a term of ten years or more; and 
their republication has been urged by many 
who desire them for preservation in a per- 
manent form. They are now presented in -a 
new light, in a logical order for the elucida- 
tion and emphasis of a truth which is com- 
mon to them all. 

The gaining of the thoughts of this vol- 
ume has not been without cost to its writer. 
His hope is that the considering of them 
will not be without stimulus and profit to 
its readers. 

H. C. T. 

Philadelphia, 

August 14, 1889.. 



CONTENTS. 



I. PAGE 

The Comfort of Christian Paradoxes .... 9 

II. 

A Part is Greater than the Whole 15 

III. 
The Littles are the Larger 23 

IV. 

One and One are More than Two 29 

V. 
The Newer is the Older 37 

VI. 

Disclosing is Concealing 45 

VII. 
Fulness is Emptiness 55 

VIII. 
Giving is Getting 65 

IX. 

Not Two Sides to Every Question . . . . . 73 

7 



8 CONTENTS. 

X. PAGE 

Choosing While Not Choosing 81 

XI. 
The Credulity of Unbelief 89 

XII. 

Gentleness as a Force 97 

XIII. 

Having Strength to Be Weak 109 

XIV. 
Holding Back as a Means of Progress . . . .119 

XV. 
The Duty of Refusing to Do Good 127 

XVI. 
The Duty of Striving to Render One's Self 
Useless 139 

XVII. 
The Inexcusableness of Excuses 153 

XVIII. 
Changing the Past 163 

XIX. 
The Safety of Danger 173 

XX. 

Living is Dying 183 



I. 



THE COMFORT OF CHRISTIAN 
PARADOXES. 



The law of the Christian life is a paradox. 
It is made up of seeming contradictions. All 
its teachings are contrary to the common 
opinions of man. According to this law, 
giving is getting; scattering is gaining; hold- 
ing is losing; having nothing is possessing 
all things ; dying is living. It is he who is 
weak who is strong; it is he who defies dan- 
ger who avoids it; it is he who loses his life 
who finds it. Self-interest is promoted by 
unselfishness; the pleasures of earth are 
surest to him who disregards them; happi- 
ness is found only when it is no longer sought ; 
the clearest sight is of the invisible; things 
which are not, bring to naught things which 
are. Yet paradoxical as is the gospel rule of 
living, and hostile as are its teachings to 

9 



IO PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

man's ordinary opinions, the propriety of its 
requirements and the absolute truth of its 
declarations are made plain to all who fairly 
test them in their personal experience. 

A man acquires physical strength by put- 
ting forth his strength. The arm that would 
shrivel if unused, grows muscular and stal- 
wart with much exercise. Money is made 
by its risking, not by its hoarding. Grain 
lives by dying. It springs up by being 
buried. The mind gains most by giving out, 
not by taking in. Telling a thing to another 
fixes it the firmer in one's own mind. Teach- 
ing is the chiefest help to learning. Strug- 
gling against danger is safer than shrinking 
from danger. A man overtaken on a plain 
by a blinding snow-storm would peril his 
life by crouching down in the hope of evad- 
ing the pitiless blast, when he might save his 
life by rising up to trample under foot the 
snow as it falls. 

So, also, in the higher sphere of moral 
action; it is by encountering evil, not by 
shunning it, that the Christian keeps himself 



PR A CTICAL PARA D OXES. 1 1 

pure, and makes highest attainment in the 
divine life. It is by seeking the welfare of 
others that he best promotes his own welfare. 
It is by counting not his life dear, that his 
life becomes precious. It is by a spirit of 
absolute dependence that he rises to suprem- 
est independence. 

A missionary is more likely to live a life 
of holy thought and purpose, while sur- 
rounded by heathen idolaters to whom he 
proclaims the truth, than is a hermit in a 
solitary cave, with no companionship but 
books of devotion, and no occupation but a 
selfish seeking of spiritual attainments. Going 
into the homes of the impenitent, that for 
their good he may be brought face to face 
with those who forget God, is surer to make 
real the great truth of salvation to a preacher 
or a teacher, than sitting down in his room 
to meditate on its preciousness, and to com- 
fort himself with its hope. Not by flying 
from evil, but by fighting it, does the Chris- 
tian keep himself free from the stain and the 
power of evil. By giving of his faith and 



12 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

love to others does he gain in faith and love. 
Spiritual safety and spiritual progress are to 
be found in the thickest of spiritual dangers, 
and in the surmounting of spiritual obstacles. 
" There are two ways of defending a castle," 
says Phillips Brooks, in holding up the ex- 
ample of the pattern life of Jesus : " one by 
shutting yourself in it, and guarding every 
loop-hole; the other by making it an open 
center of operations from which all the sur- 
rounding country may be subdued. Is not 
the last the truest safety? Jesus was never 
guarding himself, but always invading the 
lives of others with his holiness. . . . His 
life was like an open stream that keeps the 
sea from flowing up into it by the eager force 
with which it flows down into the sea. He 
was so anxious that the world should be saved 
that therein was his salvation from the world. 
He labored so to make the world pure that 
he never even had to try to be pure himself. 
. . . Some people seem to be here in the 
world just on their guard all the while, always 
so afraid of doing wrong that they never do 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 3 

anything really right. They do not add to 
the world's moral force. . . . All merely 
negative purity has something of the taint 
of the impurity that it resists. The effort 
not to be frivolous is frivolous itself. The 
effort not to be selfish is very apt to be only 
another form of selfishness." 

Being in earnest about something worth 
living for is the best cure for frivolousness. 
Doing for others what needs doing — at a 
personal sacrifice — is the surest way of 
overcoming selfishness. Striving to win the 
impure to a life of rectitude is a greater help 
to purity than the direct endeavor to crush 
out all unholy desires from one's own heart. 
There is no protection of self like forgetful- 
ness of self in devotion to Christ, and in 
active efforts for the good of those whom 
Christ loves. Progress is never made more 
surely by the Christian than when, at the call 
of duty, he enters a path which is beset by 
obstacles and hindrances at every step. 

These paradoxes are as true for our lives, 
in the present time, as they have been for 



14 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Christians generally in all the ages. What 
we give away wisely we shall still hold. 
What we seek to make sure will be most 
uncertain. In cheering the despondent we 
shall be cheered. In taking upon our shoul- 
ders the burdens of others, we shall find our 
own burdens lightened. In imparting spirit- 
ual knowledge to the ignorant we shall gain 
in spiritual knowledge. In moving against 
greatest spiritual obstacles at the call of God 
we shall make greatest spiritual progress. 
In seeking out the unholy that we may be 
the means of good to them, we shall be 
freest from danger of religious apathy. In 
disregarding our property, our position, our 
reputation, our usefulness, or our life, in com- 
parison with duty, we shall be the gainer in 
all these things ; our interests will be safer, 
our reputation higher, our usefulness greater, 
and our life better worth the saving. And 
this is the way by which we can get comfort 
out of Christian paradoxes. 



II. 



A PART IS GREATER THAN THE 
WHOLE. 



It is an axiom in mathematics that "the 
whole is greater than a part;" but it is a fact 
in practical life that a part is greater than the 
whole. Indeed, Plato quotes this declaration 
as from Hesiod, and affirms its correctness. 
The poet and the philosopher are agreed 
concerning it, even though the mathemati- 
cian may deny it. 

None of us can love the whole human 
race as we can love some one person of that 
race; and our interest in the race as a whole 
commonly increases in proportion to our in- 
terest in its various portions. The grandeur 
and sublimity of the material heavens are 
never apprehended by any sweep of the eyes 
over the entire reach of the firmament, as by 
the search with the telescope into the starry 

15 



1 6 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

wonders of a single quarter of the heavens. 
We never have such an interest in knowledge 
in general as we have in some particular 
branch of knowledge ; nor has any branch 
of knowledge any such hold upon us by its 
entirety as it has by its minor details, into 
which we have searched diligently. 

As a practical force, the wedge has more 
power than a sphere. The thin edge of the 
axe or the jagged edge of the saw has greater 
efficiency than the polished surface of either. 
Modern science puts an explosive charge into 
the cannon-ball, as well as behind it, in order 
that the ball may burst and do greater exe- 
cution by its fragments than it could as a 
complete and unbroken whole. 

In all efforts to arouse men to duty or to 
convince men of truth, there is more power 
in a one-sided or a partial presentation of the 
case, than there could be in a well-balanced 
consideration of all that is by any possibil- 
ity involved in the issue. Reformers have 
always been men of one idea; and their par- 
tiality of view has been an important element 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1/ 

of their power in bringing others to see the 
importance of what, to their minds, was all- 
important. The earnest argument of the ad- 
vocate is, ordinarily, more influential with 
the jury, than is the unimpassioned charge 
of the judge; and this even when the jury 
seeks to give a righteous verdict, and gives 
it. The right side seems more clearly the 
right, when no opposing or qualifying con- 
siderations are before the mind. 

A preacher, as a rule, has power, not in pro- 
portion to his fairness in stating both sides of 
every question touched by him, and to his 
habit of bringing out many truths at the same 
time in their due proportions and relations, 
but according to his earnestness in showing 
one truth at a time, and the best side of that. 
Any leader is a gainer in his leading-power 
when his zeal and enthusiasm see, and bring 
others to see, only one way in which to go, 
and that — the way he is going. This it is 
that makes a part greater than the whole as 
a plea for duty or for right. 

The man who can see all sides of a subject 



1 8 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

with like clearness and equal interest is no 
man to bring others to see the importance of 
any one phase of that subject, however he 
may, himself, enjoy his impartial and judicial 
apprehension of its merits. He is admirably 
fitted to give the casting vote, when all the 
world is a tie on that subject, and only a final 
decision is waited for; but so long as the see- 
saw of controversy continues, he neither "goes 
up nor goes down with either end of the 
plank. His standing-place is over the pivotal 
log, with nothing to do beyond a slight kink 
of his knees — first one and then the other — 
to keep himself in equilibrium. His mission 
in the engine of the world's action is that of 
the balancq-wheel, rather than of the piston. 
He is too well rounded a man to push his 
way through a crowd. There is no thin edge 
to him, by which he can force in where there 
is a jam. It is good to have such men in 
the world. They are good for judges, good 
as examples, good in their power for the 
future; but they are not good as reformers, 
as pioneers, as advocates, as leaders, for the 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 9 

present hour. A really well-rounded man 
belongs — like every polished sphere — on the 
summit of a column, or elsewhere in the 
place of the finished and the ornamental. 
He may be a very good man, but he is not 
the man to do the most good, or to bring 
others to do it. 

On the wrong side as well as on the right, 
a part is more effective than the whole. No 
lie is so damaging to any person or cause as 
a half-truth. A caricature has its force in 
the fact that its representation of the man is 
no more wholly false than it is wholly true. 
Its partial view is its whole -power. Baseless 
slander is never to be dreaded like misrepre- 
sentation. The out and out false is harmless, 
in comparison with the half and half wit- 
nessing to one's spirit and speech and action, 
by an enemy. The partial is more potent of 
evil than the wholly false, as it is more 
potent of good than the whole truth. 

Whatever is incomplete is of course but 
partial ; and the incomplete has, always, more 
in it by its possibilities and its suggestions 



20 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

than the finished has by its actualities. When 
the end is reached, or the desire attained, 
there is no longer room for noble desire or 
ennobled endeavor. The resistless conqueror 
of the world becomes the crying boy when 
there are no more worlds to conquer. His 
manhood is gone when the purpose of his 
manhood is realized. And so it is with all 
the completeness that this world can offer or 
can show. 

As a rule, those whose work is best and 
longest in the world are those who are cut 
off with their work unfinished. What they 
did do was so full of suggestions and expec- 
tations of what they were to do, that their 
glorified memory remains an example and 
an inspiration beyond all that their completed 
work could have been. And so the part that 
they did is more than the whole that they 
could have done. It is the broken column, 
rather than the capped one, that marks the 
grave of him whose life is still a power in 
the world. The gain of the whole is often a 
loss of the power and the beauty of the par- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 21 

tial. In this sense it is that Paul says of our 
earthly and human " knowledge, it shall van- 
ish away. For [now] we know in part, and we 
prophesy in part: but when that which is per- 
fect [is complete] is come, that which is in part 
shall be done away." All the inspirations 
and all the hopes and all the strivings that 
grow out of the suggestions of the incom- 
plete, are inevitably at an end when the com- 
plete is attained to. Hence it is that in this 
world the immediate power of the partial 
and the incomplete is greater than the power 
of the finished and the perfect. 

In architecture, a pinnacle or a spire has 
teachings beyond those of a dome; for a dome 
is complete in itself, while the spire or the pin- 
nacle points to something yet higher. This 
it is which makes Gothic architecture more 
uplifting and inspiriting than the Roman- 
esque. St. Peter's is wonderfully impressive. 
To stand under its majestic dome, and to look 
upward and around upon its varied magnifi- 
cences, awes one with a sense of grandeur 
and immensity. But the very symmetry and 



22 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

finish of that place of holy beauty are so 
satisfying that the mind rests within their 
limits. Not so. the graceful pointed arches 
and the towering clustered pillars of the choir 
and transepts of Westminster Abbey. They 
lift and carry one above themselves. They 
point beyond. The mind cannot be satisfied 
with the reach to which they have attained. 
There is impressiveness in St. Peter's. There 
is inspiration in Westminster Abbey. Even 
the old Romans when they would build a 
temple to all their gods, as in the Pantheon, 
left its dome open at the top, that its incom- 
pleteness might carry the thought of the up- 
looker to the heavens above the temple. 

That which is true in architecture is true in 
the whole realm of mind and matter. 

" Nothing resting in its own completeness 

Can have worth or beauty ; but alone 
Because it leads and tends to further sweetness, 
Fuller, higher, deeper, than its own." 



III. 

THE LITTLES ARE THE LARGER. 



The littles have their place and part in mak- 
ing up the larger; everybody admits that. 
More than this, the littles are often in them- 
selves the larger ; not everybody realizes that. 
Not in one sphere alone, but in all spheres, 
this paradox is found to be a simple truth. 

All great discoveries are made through ob- 
serving the little things rather than the larger 
ones. It is the man who watches the swing- 
ing lamp, or the falling apple, or the fly- 
ing kite, or the twitching muscles of the 
frog, or the convulsive lifting of the kettle- 
cover, or who pores in study over the lenses 
of the microscope, who brings to light new 
forces in nature, and new helps to toil, and 
to power, and to health. More has been 
learned concerning the material universe be- 
yond our globe, by the examination of the 

23 



24 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

single rays of light from the distant orbs, 
under the scrutiny of the spectroscope, than 
by all the survey of the vast orbs themselves 
in the limitless sweep of the telescope. And 
the great scholar in any sphere always shows 
his greatness rather in his new uplifting of 
an overlooked little in his realm of research, 
than in his setting in a new light the great 
truths which even an untrained eye could 
see, and an unskilled mind could perceive 
the meaning of. 

Old soldiers have no such fear of heavy 
artillery as of light infantry, in the hour of 
action. They do not dread the ponderous 
round shot, or the shrieking Parrott shell, as 
they do the hissing bullet that pierces the air, 
and the tissues of life, like a flying needle. 
It is said that the cost of the fences in Amer- 
ica is greater in the aggregate than the cost 
of the buildings. It is certainly the case that 
the smaller items exceed in amount the 
larger ones in every man's cash account. 
And when it comes to the troubles and wor- 
ries of life, who will say that it is the great 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 25 

things rather than the little ones which make 
up his daily burden, and that cost him his 
keenest heart-pangs? 

Many a man who could nerve himself up 
to bear the amputation of a limb, or who 
could move forward unflinchingly into the 
thick of battle, shrinks like a child from 
the thought of having a tooth pulled, or an 
inflamed finger lanced. The very smallness 
of the demand for courage stands as a bar- 
rier to heroism. As there are poisons which 
kill surely in small doses, but which work 
their own cure in larger portions, so there 
are many trials and causes of suffering which 
are overpowering and deadly in proportion 
to their seeming insignificance. Those who 
could bear great griefs courageously, and 
who could grandly meet great emergencies, 
are powerless in the presence of discomforts 
and annoyances which are large enough to 
be a reality, but too small to create a demand 
on all the energies of mind and heart. 

And because the littles are the larger, it 
behooves us to look well to the littles in our 



26 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

dealings with others, and in our being and 
our doing before God. It is by our littles that 
we have power for good or for ill among our 
fellows; it is by our littles that our character 
is both shaped and shown; and it is by our 
littles that we are to be finally and fairly 
judged of God. 

It is by the little word or deed of loving 
kindness and loving sympathy that we make 
other hearts glad, and that we win the love 
and gratitude of others. And it is by the 
little word of thoughtless or deliberate un- 
kindness or severity that we give pain to 
others, and that we leave sad or bitter memo- 
ries of our unlovely course in the minds of 
those whose love and respect we might have 
won and held. It is often true that — 

" A clouded face 
Strikes deeper than an angry blow." 

It requires constant watchfulness to guard 
our littles in speech and conduct. It is 
harder to be always right in little things, 
than to be always right in great things. It 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 27 

is easier to show littleness in the doing or the 
attempting of great things, than it is to show 
greatness in the doing or attempting of little 
things. But both these things are possible; 
and both of them are sure to be recognized, 
and to have their potency, whenever and 
wherever they are manifested. 

We judge our fellows, we are judged of 
others, and God judges us, by little things 
rather than by those that are obviously great 
things. It is the unconscious, the instinctive, 
and the impulsive word and act of those 
whom we observe, rather than their more 
deliberate and formal expressions of self, by 
which we shape our estimate of them. And 
in the same way we are judged by the world 
about us. It is more important for us, in 
fact, to have a care to our course in the 
minor affairs of every-day life than in the 
greater matters and on the chief occasions, 
when everybody knows that we are on our 
guard and are at our best. 

When the Lord chose men for Gideon's 
army, he judged them by the way in which 



28 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

they performed so simple an act as drinking 
from a spring. In our Lord's parable, it was 
the man who had taken care of one pound 
faithfully, to whom his master gave the rule 
of ten cities. God is judging every one of 
us just now by the manner in which we do 
our simplest tasks. And his rule of judging 
is of universal application : " He that is faith- 
ful in a very little is faithful also in much ; 
and he that is unrighteous in a very little is 
unrighteous also in much." 



IV. 

ONE AND ONE ARE MORE 
THAN TWO. 



Even in cold hard mathematics, a unit 
gives or gains added power beyond its in- 
trinsic value by its position with reference to 
another unit. One and one put together be- 
come not two, but eleven. And if it be the 
fact that in the realm of this exact science a 
unit tenfolds the value of another unit, and 
adds its own value to it besides, simply by 
its juxtaposition with that other unit, who 
will question that, in the sphere of being and 
doing, one person and one person brought 
into right relations to each other are more 
by far than two persons ; or that their aggre- 
gate power is more than doubled? 

"Two are better than one," says the 
Preacher; and then he gives as a reason 
for this gain : " For if they fall, the one will 

29 



30 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is 
alone when he falleth, and hath not another 
to lift him up." There certainly can be no 
question that one live man and another live 
man are worth at least eleven times the prac- 
tical value of one dead man. And it is ob- 
vious that the life of either of two men may- 
depend on the helping hand of another man 
in the hour of peculiar need. Moreover, 
while they live, and are not in special danger, 
two men may gain tenfold power from one 
another by means of the sympathy and coun- 
sel and life-quickening assistance which they 
render each to the other. 

" Iron sharpeneth iron ; so a man sharpen- 
eth the countenance of his friend," says the 
Wise Man, concerning friendship. An iron 
instrument sharpened is fully ten times as 
effective for its instrumental purposes as it 
could be with a dulled edge; and since no 
iron instrument can sharpen itself all by 
itself, one iron instrument and another iron 
instrument, sharpening one another by their 
clashing and mutual rubbings, tenfold each 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 3 1 

other's value through being together. And 
as it is with iron and iron, so it is with friend 
and friend. 

It is hard to stand all by one's self, battling 
a host without a human fellow to speak a 
word of stimulus or cheer. Not every man 
is capable of being an Athanasius, to go 
against the whole world when the whole 
world goes against God. But when one true 
man finds another true man by his side, the 
two may be a host in themselves; they may, 
in fact, be all the world to each other. Each 
is no longer one, nor are the two merely two. 
Each is more than one, and the two are many 
times more than two. This thought it is that 
gives point to the inspired suggestion, that in 
the Lord's service, in battling with the world, 
"one" believer shall "chase a thousand, and 
two" shall "put ten thousand to flight;" two 
having tenfold the power of one. 

This truth is not a mere sentiment; it has 
a practical basis in the necessities of the case. 
No man can be at his own best, all by him- 
self. He needs the stimulus and the cheer 



32 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

of another to bring his own best into action. 
His powers can be at their full only in and 
through their expression ; and they can have 
expression only when expression to another 
is called for. 

Take, for example, a physician with the 
case of a very sick patient to tax his sense 
of responsibility. He is doing as well as he 
knows how, when the friends of the patient 
desire him to call in another physician in 
consultation. At once a new pressure is 
brought to bear upon him. He must be 
ready to state the case of his patient to his 
brother practitioner, with a sense of profes- 
sional responsibility in that statement. His 
powers of observation are quickened accord- 
ingly. He scrutinizes the case with keener 
perceptions than before. He is more of a 
physician, through this added pressure, than 
would be possible without such pressure. 
The one is already more than one. A simi- 
lar process goes on in the mind of the prac- 
titioner called in from without. His powers 
also are aroused by the appeal to his profes- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 33 

sional skill, and to his professional responsi- 
bility. He is more of a physician for this 
case, under this peculiar pressure, than he 
could be for the same case if it were left to 
him alone. 

Then the two physicians, who are already 
more than two, test each other, and examine 
their common charge together. Every effort 
that either makes to state the facts as he sees 
them, or to formulate his opinion as that 
opinion must be formulated, enlarges his 
capabilities as a physician in charge of the 
case. Meanwhile each fresh suggestion made 
by either is a quickener to the thought of 
the other. There is no longer one stand- 
point of observation for both, but there are 
two standpoints of observation for each. 
Either becomes more than twice the man he 
was before, and the two together are more 
than twice two. Where either might have 
failed by himself, the two may prove a 
success. 

And as it is with the physician, so it is 
with the lawyer; so, indeed, it is with every 
3 



34 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

thinker or doer in his realm of thought or 
of action : one and one may be many times 
more than two. No man can study to so 
good advantage all by himself, as with the 
help of another. In elementary branches, a 
man studies best with the help of a teacher ; 
but if it be that he is above needing a teach- 
er's help, he still has need of a fellow-student, 
or of a pupil. He needs another to whom 
he can express himself, in order to secure 
the gain of expression. By himself, he can 
never be more than a unit. With another, 
he and his fellow can be more than two units. 
This it is that makes the best Sunday-school 
teachers value most the Sunday-school teach- 
ers'-meeting ; and that makes those who at- 
tend the teachers'-meeting the best teachers ; 
for one and one are more than two — in a 
teachers'-meeting as elsewhere. 

Independence of character, and indepen- 
dence of thought, and independence of action, 
are admirable and praiseworthy attainments ; 
but no man can be independent without 
another man to help him. It takes at least 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 35 

two to enable one to be independent. A 
man can shut himself up within himself all 
by himself; but in order to express himself, 
he must have some one to express himself 
to; and unless a man gives expression to 
himself, one part of his nature, and the most 
important part at that, is not brought into 
play. There must be both centrifugal and 
centripetal forces at work to enable an orb 
to keep moving on in its own circuit, in the 
mental or in the moral, as well as in the natu- 
ral world; and only as a man opens himself 
outward toward an object of attraction, while 
still holding himself in toward his own truest 
inner self, can he be his best self, or be him- 
self at his best. Thus it is that, in order for 
a man to be at his fullest power, he must 
have another person with whom he stands 
in such relations that himself and the other 
are as eleven, rather than as two. 

And so we find that we are dependent on 
others to enable us to be ourselves, and that 
others are dependent on us in order to be 
themselves. Others need us, and we need 



36 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

others. Each one of us is only one, but one 
and one in right relations make ten and one ; 
each one being, in that association, tenfolded 
without the loss of its unit power. Here, as 
elsewhere, out-giving is in-taking; and he 
who is one with another is more than one 
in himself. 



V. 

THE NEWER IS THE OLDER. 



New and Old are terms which are continu- 
ally being confused or interchanged. That 
which one man calls "new," another man 
calls "old;" and again the same man calls 
the same thing both "new" and "old." As 
a result of this confusion in the use of the 
terms "new" and "old," there comes a con- 
fusion of the ideas which these terms are 
intended to convey, until it may truly be said 
that that which we commonly call the old 
is really the new, while that which we call 
the newer is the older. 

It is not even a new thing to say that the 
newer is the older. When Tennyson sug- 
gests that each new century is older than the 
one which went before it; 

" For we are Ancients of the earth 
And in the morning of the times ;" 

37 



38 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

he simply reiterates the declaration of Lord 
Bacon, that "these times are the ancient 
times, when the world is ancient, and not 
those which we account ancient, ordine retro- 
grado, by a computation backward from our- 
selves ;" and Bacon in turn only rephrased 
the truth, which had long before been recog- 
nized, and which has many times since been 
re-emphasized, " that the later times are more 
aged than the earlier ;" that, in fact, there 
never was a time when the world was as old 
as it is to-day, and that every dweller in the 
world is older to-day than ever before. 

Three thousand years ago it was affirmed 
by inspiration, " There is no new thing under 
the sun," and in defense of this proposition 
it was declared : " Is there any thing whereof 
it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been 
already of old time which was before us." 
And all the progress of knowledge in the 
growing centuries since the days of Solomon 
has gone to prove anew this truth which 
stood out so prominently when the world 
was three thousand years younger than in 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 39 

these older times. Most of the new science 
and the new theology and the new inven- 
tions of to-day are but revivals, in this older 
time, of that which was known in the new r er 
ages, and forgotten as the times grew old : 

" For out of the old fleldes, as men saithe 

Cometh al this new corne fro to yere to yere ; 
And out of old bookes, in good faithe, 

Cometh all this new science that men lere." 

But this is only a proof of our mistaking the 
old and forgotten for that which is new. It 
is not an illustration of the greater error of 
speaking of times and seasons as the new, 
when they are obviously the older. 

When we number our own years, we speak 
of the earlier ones as our younger years, and 
of the later ones as our older years; and we 
recognize the fact that old age is before us, 
not behind us ; that we are moving toward 
it, not away from it. But when we speak of 
the "new year" in the progress of time, we 
really mean a year that is older than its pre- 
decessors ; a year that will find us older than 



40 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

ever before, and that will make us still older 
and older with its every passing hour. And 
this contradiction in the use of the terms 
"old" and "new," as applied to the years in 
our history and in the world's history, has 
its bewildering and its misleading influence 
on our thoughts, and through our thoughts 
on our conduct, and ultimately, through 
thought and conduct, on our characters. 

Who can doubt, for instance, that we 
should have other thoughts, and be incited 
to different conduct, and even be helped 
toward another character, if we were always, 
in the holiday season, to speak to each other 
of the hastening close of the new year, and 
the coming dawn of an older year? What 
a contrast would come from so simple a 
change as a more accurate phrasing of our 
holiday greetings: "A happy older year to 
you!" "Good-by to the newer year, and 
welcome to the older!" 

" Ring in the old, ring out the new, 
Ring happy bells across the snow; 
New year is going, let him go." 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 4 1 

There would come to the mind a new sense 
of an old truth through such a greeting! 

It may, indeed, be said, that each coming 
year in the world's history is new in the 
sense that it is entirely novel to us, and that 
this is understood in our use of the term 
"new" as applied to it. But the same might 
be said for the coming years in our personal 
history; for old age itself is quite novel to us 
all, — and it even comes upon us unexpect- 
edly, — yet that does not justify us in calling 
old age new age. And our inconsistency in 
applying the terms "new" and "old" to our 
years, and to the world's years, has a practical 
bearing on our view of life, of life's duties and 
of life's opportunities, which is worthy of 
serious consideration by us all. 

What we call the new year is not new in 
the sense in which we commonly speak of 
newness; on the contrary, it is old in the 
sense in which we commonly speak of ad- 
vanced age. There is no freshness to our- 
selves in a new year, no new suppleness of 
body or mind, no youthful ease of planning 



42 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

or doing. The first day of each "new" year 
finds us more fixed in habit, more rigid in 
fiber, more inflexible in every taste and pur- 
pose, and less liable to change, for the better 
or for the worse, — in fact older, — than we 
were on the last day of the " old " year. If we 
would but realize this truth, how we should 
hasten to accomplish the purposed good, or 
to begin the planned reforms in the rapidly 
passing new year, instead of postponing them, 
as so many of us incline to do, until the sure 
coming older year is fairly upon us. And it 
is because we mis-name the older year by 
calling it the new year, that we are so 
tempted to look upon the very worst time 
for reforms as the very best time. 

But, it is often said, and it is yet more 
often thought, that even though our lives 
are not to be made new in the coming 
year, they may then at least be renewed, 
so that our old failures may be canceled and 
followed by our new successes. And this 
thought it is which so often gives hope in 
the looking away from a misspent youth to 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 43 

a possibly-to-be-improved age, and which 
inclines us all to believe that the next year 
may be a better year to us, through its 
renewings, if not through its newness. 

We must remember, however, that the re- 
newal of our lives and characters comes not 
from the passing years, but comes, if at all, 
against the tendency and influence of those 
years; that it comes not from and of our- 
selves alone, but from a power outside of 
and above ourselves, and outside of and 
above all the sweep of the changing years. 
He who alone can say, " Behold, I make all 
things new/ 1 is "the same yesterday and 
to-day, and forever," and his "accepted 
time" of making changes for good in any 
heart is not the new year nor yet the old 
year, but the immediate "to-day" — which 
passes away with the declining sun. 

It is both sin and folly for us to sup- 
pose that we are to gain any renewed life 
by renewed contact with the aging world; 
that we are to become in any sense new 
by our approach to an older year. That 



44 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

was a Pagan fancy, but it is not a Chris- 
tian fact. 

In the ancient fable, the Libyan wrestler 
Antaeus was said to gain new strength 
whenever his feet touched his mother-earth; 
but the earth is not the true mother of the 
Christian believer; it is the city of our God, 
the "Jerusalem that is above, . . . which 
is our mother;" and it is when we rise 
above the earth, not when we come back 
to it, it is when our heads and our hearts 
touch our mother-heaven, not when our feet 
touch the mother-earth, that we gain renewed 
strength, in our wrestling, for spiritual vic- 
tory over the foes which so sorely beset us. 

" Even the youths [in the newest year] shall 
faint and be weary, and the young men [who 
wait for a better time] shall utterly fall : but 
they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their 
strength; they shall mount up with wings as 
eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; 
they shall walk, and not faint" 



VI. 

DISCLOSING IS CONCEALING. 



There is no such thing as making a dis- 
closure without thereby causing a conceal- 
ment. To hold up one side to view, is to 
shut away the other side from view. The 
very sun itself throws one-half of our globe 
into shadow by shining as clearly as it can 
on all of the globe that is presented to it. 
And what can be clearer than sunlight? 

It may even be said that God himself can- 
not make a revelation of his character, or of 
his truth, without making that revelation also 
a cause of concealment. His revelation of 
the spiritual and of the infinite must be made 
by material and finite agencies, in language 
which at the best is only suggestive, and 
which, indeed, limits the thoughts by its 
seeming definiteness. When God says that 
he has the love of a father, the tenderness of 

45 



46 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

a mother, and the unselfish fidelity of a friend, 
that wonderful revelation of his condescen- 
sion and his sympathy brings light on his 
personality just far enough to indicate the 
measureless depths beyond — which cannot 
be revealed to mere man. The same revela- 
tion will reveal more to, and will conceal less 
from, one person than another; but, to all, 
its partial concealments are inevitable. 

When, at the last visit of Jesus to the tem- 
ple, his Father's voice sounded out from 
heaven in answer to his prayer, the larger 
number of those who stood by and heard 
the heavenly voice "said that it had thun- 
dered: others said, An angel hath spoken 
to him." Only he who was one with the 
Father comprehended the revelation which 
was to himself, and yet was for the sake of 
those who heard it. So it is with every dis- 
closure of divine truth; the very words of 
revelation conceal so much even in their 
revealings, as to be a cause of ceaseless dif- 
ference among those who learn from them 
according to their measure of ability of com- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 47 

prehension. So long as man is man, God's 
revealings to man — the revealings of God's 
works and of God's words — must be but the 
concealings of God. 

" Lo, these are but the outskirts of his ways : 
And how small a whisper do we hear of him ! 
But the thunder of his power who can understand ?" 

The greater the light of disclosure, the 
surer the concealment of that which is be- 
yond the light; for the very splendor of the 
light that we see is the dazzling cause of our 
inability to see aught save that light itself. 
Says George MacDonald, " There is a dark- 
ness that comes of effulgence ; and the most 
veiling of all veils is the light. That for 
which the eye exists is light, but through 
light no human eye can pierce." Who would 
say that he could see most by looking directly 
at the sun itself? Who would dare think that 
he could look into the very face of God, and 
live? And because of this truth it is that 
God graciously conceals from us enough in 
all his disclosures of himself to enable us to 



48 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

use our sight to advantage, by reason of the 
concealment which is made in his brightest 
disclosings to us. 

Nor does man ever wholly reveal himself 
to his fellow-man. He has not the power of 
doing it even if he would. Rarely has he 
the purpose of so doing. If one should ask 
you to tell him what was in your thoughts, 
you might give him a partial answer; you 
would not lay your whole heart bare to him ; 
and in most cases you would thank God that 
your questioner could not read you through 
and through. Your very answer would tend 
to the concealing of the thoughts kept back, 
by its giving larger prominence to those 
which were revealed. The light thrown on 
the truth told would but deepen the shadows 
over the truth concealed. And commonly 
this is in the plan of those who speak of 
their thoughts and feelings to others. They 
desire to conceal quite as much as they re- 
veal. In this sense it is that so many have 
held that the true use of speech is for the 
concealing of our thoughts; a sentiment that 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 49 

has been ascribed to Talleyrand, and that was 
certainly expressed by Voltaire and Gold- 
smith and Young, but which was modified 
by quaint old Dr. South after this fashion: 
"Speech was given to the ordinary sort of 
men whereby to communicate their mind; 
but to wise men, whereby to conceal it." 

There is comfort in this thought, in view 
of all that we would conceal from others; 
but again it brings a certain sadness in its 
suggestion of our helplessness at revealing 
all of ourselves which we would make clear 
to those whom we love and trust, and with 
whom we are in closest sympathy. We 
cannot fully disclose ourselves to others even 
when we would. "All language by express- 
ing some thoughts conceals many others. 
Much is repressed by every effort that we 
make towards expression. If we try to un- 
bosom our hearts to each other, we hide as 
much as we reveal. We wrap ourselves 
round in mystery when we are most com- 
municative." 

At the best we cannot reveal our innermost 
4 



50 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

thoughts, or our truest selves, to another, by 
the imperfect medium of human speech. 
Tennyson says : 

" I sometimes hold it half a sin 
To put in words the grief I feel ; 
For words, like nature, half reveal 
And half conceal the soul within." 

And this is a truth concerning which we all 
have more or less of sad experiences, in our 
failures to communicate our noblest, our 
purest, and our tenderest emotions to those 
from whose spiritual gaze we have least 
shrinking. The very efforts we make to 
reveal our spirit and purposes and feelings, 
so often prove a concealing of that which we 
seek to disclose; because our words have 
one meaning to us, and another meaning to 
those who hear them. That which we would 
fain have made the voice of an angel, has 
seemed to them as the rumblings of the sum- 
mer's thunder-cloud; least of all like a help- 
ful word from heaven. 

And if God cannot wholly reveal himself 
to us, or we to our fellows, how surely must 



PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 5 x 

we fail in learning our fellows by their reveal- 
ings of themselves in word or in act. That 
which, in one whom you now judge, is con- 
cealed by the very disclosure you perceive, 
may be that which would turn your prompted 
censure of him into admiring praise, if it 
could only be known to you. One's best as 
well as one's worst is often concealed in the 
process of attempted disclosure. In every 
case the freest disclosure of himself to you 
which now is possible to one of your fellow- 
beings, cannot but be a concealing of much 
which is essential to your fair judging of him, 
to your understanding of him as he is. 

But while God cannot yet reveal himself 
to us without concealing far more than he 
reveals, and while we can neither fully dis- 
close ourselves to our fellows, nor have our 
fellows fully disclosed to us, we can be, we 
are, disclosed wholly to God, without any 
concealment whatsoever. •" There is no crea- 
ture that is not manifest in his sight: but all 
things are naked and laid open before the 
eyes of him with whom we have to do." 



52 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

"Woe unto them that seek deep to hide their 
counsel from the Lord, and their works are 
in the dark, and they say, Who seeth us? 
and who knoweth us?" "He knoweth what 
is in the darkness, and the light dwelleth 
with him." " He knoweth the secrets of the 
heart." 

Such knowledge is too wonderful for us; 
it is high, we cannot attain unto it. The 
thought of light without shadow is beyond 
our present comprehension, even while we 
know that it is a reality. The poet pictures 
it to us, when he says : — 

" Far off — worlds off — in the Pleiades seven, 
Is a Star of the stars — Alcyone ; 
The orb which moves never in all the heaven, 
The center of all the sweet light we see. 

u And there, thou shadow of Earth's pale seeming, 
The wisest say, no shadow can be, 
But perfect splendors, lucidly streaming, 
And life and light at intensity." 

The painter has given us another picture of 
it, yet nearer to the incommunicable truth. 
In Gerome's marvelously impressive repre- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 53 

sentation of The Repose in Egypt, out upon 
the darkness of the desert night-scene there 
glows and radiates a clear shining light from 
the very presence of the Holy Babe in the 
arms of the Virgin Mother, resting between 
the mammoth paws and under the overhang- 
ing massive face of the grim and gloomy 
sphinx. No shadow is possible there; no 
concealment, in the light of Him who is 
"the Light of the World," "Light of Light, 
very God of very God." 

Even the inspired revelator can declare 
this truth only in suggestive and imperfect 
imagery, as he tells of that City of the re- 
deemed — not in the far-off Alcyone, but in 
the presence of Him who was once that Holy 
Babe in the Land of Darkness: "And the 
city hath no need of the sun, neither of the 
moon, to shine upon it: for the glory of God 
did lighten it, and the lamp thereof is the 
Lamb. . . . And there shall be night no 
more ; and they need no light of lamp, neither 
light of sun; for the Lord God shall give 
them light." 



54 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

There, at last, shall concealment be impos- 
sible, and full disclosure be an accomplished 
reality. There shall we know and be known ; 
know as we are known. But that perfect 
knowledge is not yet attained to. Disclos- 
ing has not yet ceased to be concealing; nor 
can disclosing be unlimited disclosure while 
we are still in the life that is. 



VII. 

FULNESS IS EMPTINESS. 



A capitalist whose wealth is estimated at 
many millions is currently reported to have 
said that his surplus scores of millions are 
of minor account to him, inasmuch as any 
man ought to be satisfied when himself and 
his family are beyond the possibility of want. 
This conception of a desirable condition is 
one that would probably find acceptance with 
very many persons; yet it is based upon a 
fundamental error, and it is radically wrong 
in its practical bearings as well as in its 
underlying basis. 

To be without want is to be without ambi- 
tion, is to be without hope, is to be without 
the truest joy, is to be without the fullest life; 
it is to be empty in the saddest and most 
pitiable sense. There is, indeed, no con- 
ceivable emptiness like that of fulness, with 

55 



56 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

its absence of want. He, therefore, who is 
so full as to be beyond want, is not only the 
poorest of men, but he is a lost man with no 
possibility of redemption. Yet it is after this 
state of poverty, this hopelessly lost state, 
that a great majority of the human race is 
untiringly striving. And it is because of 
error at this point that the greatest of mis- 
takes is made for the life that is, and for the 
life that is to come. 

From the lowest plane to the highest, it is 
want that is the truest fulness ; and fulness is 
emptiness. The veriest serpent of the dust 
loses its fascinating attractiveness when it 
lies prone and motionless, gorged with its 
fulness of devoured prey. Being, in its ful- 
ness, utterly beyond want, it is, for the time, 
without power, without beauty, without worth. 
Only while it is keenly alive with want, all 
its faculties alert, and all its powers on ten- 
sion for the attaining of its desires, does the 
serpent show itself in the proud capabilities of 
its fatal seductiveness. Just in proportion as 
any animal life seems to be too full to want, 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. S7 

is it without efficiency and without admi- 
rableness. Just in proportion as that life 
manifestly outreaches with never - satisfied 
desires, does it show itself in commanding 
nobleness of nature and of mission. The 
contrast between the life of the oyster and 
the life of the forest-stalking king of beasts, 
is the contrast between the lack and the pos- 
session of ever-impelling want 

Man is never of so little worth in the 
ordinary pursuits of life, nor is he ever so 
spiritless and so lacking in true enjoyment, 
as in those tropical countries where he is 
measurably beyond the pressure of personal 
want for the supply of food and clothing and 
protecting habitations. Nor does man any- 
where appear to such advantage, or attain to 
such practical efficiency, as in those more 
rugged regions where his every breath is one 
of want, and where life itself is a constant 
struggle to live. In the one case, his ful- 
ness is his emptiness ; in the other, his want 
is the earnest of his fulness. And so it is 
always and everywhere. 



58 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

It is a sense of want that keeps the world 
moving. It is a sense of want that makes 
life worth living. It is a sense of want that 
impels man to activity, and that makes ac- 
tivity itself a joy. It is a sense of want of 
exercise that makes motion a delight. It is 
a sense of want of nourishment that makes 
eating and drinking enjoyable. It is a sense 
of want of rest that makes sleep welcome. 
It is a sense of want of the means to supply 
want that makes toil a pleasure. It is a sense 
of want of knowledge that incites to study. 
It is a sense of want of position and power 
and achievement that arouses ambition, and 
that keeps ambition aroused. It is a sense 
of want of love that prompts to loving words 
and loving ways. It is a sense of want of 
larger usefulness that spurs to ever-enlarged 
and ever-increasing endeavor in every realm 
of good to others. 

So soon as a sense of want ceases in any 
sphere, efficiency there ceases also, and en- 
joyment itself is there at an end. Because of 
its lack of want, fulness itself is always empty. 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 59 

It is in the mistake of ignoring the blessed- 
ness of never-ceasing want to the human 
soul, that one of the principal religions of 
the world has its primal basis ; and it is by 
the same mistake that many believers in the 
other religions are also led astray. The first 
three great truths of the religion of Booddha 
are : First, that suffering exists wherever there 
is life; second, that suffering is caused by 
desire, or want; third, that release from suf- 
fering depends on the suppression of desire 
or want by the suppression of consciousness, 
in that state of being which is designated as 
"Nirvana." 

Therefore it is that " Nirvana," or the con- 
dition of existing without want, is the infinite 
jelly-fish heaven after w T hich millions upon 
millions of human beings are restlessly striv- 
ing. And it is because this soul-longing of 
the Booddhists so fully accords with the 
practical heart -yearnings of multitudes in 
our nominally Christian lands for a life with- 
out want, that Booddhism is many times held 
up before us in song and in story as a better 



60 PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 

religion than that which represents unceasing 
want as the joy of earth and as the hope of 
Heaven. 

As a matter of fact, the real choice, in this 
estimate of the worth of want, is between the 
view of the Christian and the view of the 
Booddhist; between heaven and nirvana. 
The man who wishes for himself or for his 
family a condition of satisfied fulness has 
set his face toward nirvana, and has turned 
his back upon heaven. For here and for 
hereafter his goal is the same. The state 
which he seeks he will never attain to, in 
this life or in the next; but meanwhile he 
will lose the state he has turned away from 
here. Such a man's longing is really for 
that condition of gorged unconsciousness 
which makes even a reptile unattractive and 
worthless; for in the emptiness of being too 
full to want, there is no distinction between 
the reptile and an archangel. 

It is want, individual conscious want, ever- 
enlarging, ever out-reaching want, want in 
all the realm of all the faculties, want beyond 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 6 1 

attainment or knowledge or conception, that 
makes heaven a possibility, that makes heaven 
a reality. Without want there is no heaven 
before us, in the life that now is; without 
want there can be no heaven in the life that 
is to come. Heaven without want is in itself 
nirvana. There is no love in nirvana; for 
love is full of want for others, even if devoid 
of want for self. So evident is this truth, 
that the Booddhist teachings warn against 
all earthly love as a source of want, and so a 
source of suffering. Heaven is full of love; 
and love, whether on earth or in heaven, is a 
state of longing. Heaven is, in fact, the 
cause of loving longing. 

"Longing is God's fresh heavenward will, 
With our poor earthward striving ; 
We quench it, that we may be still 
Content with merely living." 

Even when we give this longing its fitting 
play in love to Him who is the source and 
center of all truest love, its tireless, restful 
want goes on. The more it has, the more 



62 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

it craves. The unceasing cry of the loving 
soul is: 

"More love to thee, O Christ! 

More love to thee ! 
Hear thou the prayer I make 

On bended knee ; 
This is my earnest plea, — 
More love, O Christ ! to thee, 

More love to thee!" 

Wrongly directed want, or want without a 
possibility of its supply, would indeed be a 
curse to a man. If want were always toward 
that which is unholy or destructive, it would 
tend only to man's ruin. If want were ever 
toward that which was hopelessly beyond 
reach, it would be only wearisome and soul- 
vexing. But the truth then would be, not 
that there was want in the soul, but that the 
soul's want was not what it should be. 

Not exemption from want, therefore, but 
the right direction of want, not the being 
beyond want, but the being in the way of 
finding a ceaseless supply for ceaseless want, 
is the true state to be desired for one's self 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 63 

and for one's loved ones. Rightly directed 
want, want directed in the line of its God- 
given supplies, is the earnest and the joy of 
all intelligent personal conscious existence. 

This it is that was the impelling want of the 
inspired Apostle. " Not that I have already 
obtained," he said, "or am already made per- 
fect; but I press on, if so be that I may 
apprehend that for which also I was appre- 
hended by Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count 
not myself yet to have apprehended ; but one 
thing I do, forgetting the things which are 
behind, and stretching forward to the things 
which are before, I press on toward the goal 
unto the prize of the high calling of God in 
Christ Jesus." 

True living is a ceaseless wanting. Right 
living is a ceaseless wanting in a right direc- 
tion. The noble soul, the loving soul, the 
aspiring soul, goes outward and onward and 
upward untiringly and forever. Its course is 
like that of the asymptotic line in mathemat- 
ics, which ever approaches, but never touches, 
the limitless curve toward which it is tending;. 



64 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Its joyous prompting as it hopefully climbs 
the summits which have no ending, is : 

" Cry, Faint not, climb ! the summits slope 
Beyond the farthest flights of hope, 
Wrapt in dense cloud from base to cope." 

And its never-failing want is its never-failing 
fulness. 

Let us, then, thank God that we and ours 
are not beyond want, and that neither they 
nor we need ever be so empty as absolute 
fulness would make us. " Blessed are the 
poor in spirit," said our Lord to his loved 
ones; Blessed are the poverty-smitten, the 
souls which are not yet full ; — " for theirs is 
the kingdom of heaven'' — not the abyss of 
nirvana, but the kingdom of heaven. If we 
miss all other blessings, let us rejoice in this 
one — in the ceaseless fulness of ceaseless 
and rightly directed want. 



VIII. 

GIVING IS GETTING. 



One of the plain paradoxes which is of 
widest application in the realms of mind and 
of matter, of nature and of grace, is, that 
true gain comes only through loss; that 
hoarding is impoverishing; that there is no 
way of keeping one's hold on a desired good 
like parting with it; that acquisition is a re- 
sult of expenditure; that dividing is multi- 
plying; that scattering is increasing; that 
spending is saving; that giving is getting. 
This paradox it is which our Lord Jesus 
enunciated when he declared "It is more 
blessed to give than to receive ;" and which 
Paul had in mind, when he urged the re- 
membrance of these words of our Lord. 

The paradox which is thus affirmed in 
revelation, is confirmed in our every-day ex- 
perience ; and unless we realize its truth, and 
5 65 



66 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

act on it unvaryingly, we shall so far fail in 
securing and holding the truest material, 
mental, and moral treasures possible to us. 

Bodily strength comes from its expendi- 
ture, not from its hoarding. Every wise use 
of a muscle adds to the power of that mus- 
cle. An arm carried in a sling for its preser- 
vation stiffens and withers. An arm which 
swings a great hammer takes on largeness 
and vigor with every generous sweep through 
the air. Keenness of sight and quickness of 
hearing come from the constant taxing of 
eye and ear, not from their shielding. An 
Arab of the desert can see and hear with ten 
times the acuteness and discrimination of a 
monk of the convent, because the one has 
kept in play those senses which the other 
has permitted to remain inactive. And when 
bodily strength or life seems failing, the truest 
way of its regaining is often by its increased 
outlay. A quick walk in the cold, bracing 
air of a winter's morning will warm the chill- 
ing blood for the whole day as no cowering 
over a blazing fire will do. 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 6? 

It is the use, not the possession, of any 
material treasure, that gives it its highest 
value. Merely to have it, bears no compari- 
son in pleasurableness with its right employ- 
ment. Food is absolutely worthless except 
for eating. The man who starves at the open 
door of his full larder, is even more of a suf- 
ferer than he who famishes without the sight 
of food. Well-filled library shelves are of 
no benefit to their owner, so long as the 
books there remain unopened. But the best 
volume on those shelves would have an 
added value to its user, if it were "read to 
pieces. ,, Money gathered and kept for its 
own sake increases the discontent and crav- 
ings of its holder; while money sought and 
handled for its beneficent uses, gives pleasure 
and satisfaction to him who employs it. 

As a rule, men and women of ample means 
shrink more from the outlay of money for 
their personal convenience and enjoyment, ' 
or for the giving of pleasure to others, and 
really have less of the delights which money- 
using might secure, than persons of more 



68 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

limited income who have no desire for money 
as money ; no wish to be rich, in comparison 
with the thought of living and doing richly. 
Straitened circumstances are quite likely to 
increase with growing accumulations of 
wealth; and unsatisfied cravings for riches 
are exaggerated by every effort at their sat- 
isfying. " There is " — indeed there is — " that 
withholdeth more than is meet, but it tendeth 
to poverty." And the pinch of poverty itself 
can never nip so sharply as the pinch of with- 
holding-avarice. 

Our mental faculties gain through their 
using, and have power in proportion to their 
expenditure. A good memory is a memory 
that is taxed heavily; and the heavier the 
burdens which are laid on it, the greater its 
capacity for burden-bearing. The imagina- 
tion is cultivated by allowing it play, not by 
holding it in check. Giving out thought in 
soeech or writing increases one's treasures of 
thought, as well as one's ease and power of 
expression. Indeed, it is only by giving out 
that one fairly gets anything, in the line of 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 69 

mental furnishing. This it is that makes it 
impossible to gain knowledge while merely 
a passive recipient of instruction. 

It is as though the cells of the mind had 
doors that opened only outward. An attempt 
to push them in, by a teacher who comes 
with information worth leaving there, may 
seem for the moment to be successful ; but 
the next moment the rebounding doors fly 
back to their place again, sweeping away the 
stores which had been pressed against them. 
It is only when the mental doors are opened 
from within, by the asking of a question, or 
the re-statement of a received truth, or by 
some active outgiving of the intellectual fac- 
ulties, that there is full access to the mind's 
treasure-house for its added furnishing. It 
is not until we have said a thing that we are 
sure of it; and by every fresh giving away of 
a thought we are getting a new hold on it. 

In our moral and spiritual nature, the same 
principle prevails as in our bodily and mental 
natures. It is the using, not the having, of 
our powers, that makes them a source of en- 



70 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

joyment to us. The more affection we lav- 
ish, the more affection we have remaining. 
Indeed, there is no such thing as affection 
except in outgoing; in giving. True affec- 
tion is never selfish; it cannot be. Here is 
the difference between affection and desire; 
between loving and craving. As President 
Hopkins has said: "It is of the very nature 
of the affections that they give; and of the 
desires that they receive. The affections 
... are disinterested; they flow out from 
us ; they give, and appropriate nothing. That 
is not affection which is not disinterested." 
The exercise of desire is belittling, contract- 
ing, deteriorating. The exercise of affection 
is ennobling, enlarging, exhilarating. De- 
sire brings discomfort and unrest. Affection 
brings enjoyment and content. Hence it is 
that there is a delight and a blessing in giv- 
ing, which there cannot be in receiving. 

When a child receives gifts, or selfishly 
employs what has been given him, his desires 
are exercised, and by their very exercise they 
are strengthened and intensified. But when 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, Jl 

the child gives to others, it is his affections 
which are exercised, and which are enlarged 
by their exercise. By the one course, he is 
narrowed and shut in on himself; by the 
other his heart is expanded, and made glad 
in its larger freedom and its greater play. As 
with the child, so with those of us of any 
age. Only as we give, do we get anything 
that is worth getting. Only in our giving, 
do we find the real pleasure of living. Our 
enjoyment in social life and in all our friend- 
ships hinges on our power to give help or 
happiness to others. Our success in such 
giving measures our delight in the inter- 
course. If we find that our affection, our 
ministry, our presence, is a source of com- 
fort or pleasure, we recognize a blessing just 
there. But if we cannot give helpfully in 
that direction, nothing that we there receive 
can compensate for our failure to impart 
good gifts. 

Our enjoyment in the truths and the duties 
and the privileges of the Christian life is 
made dependent, in the plan of God, on our 



72 PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 

making use of them for others. It is in our 
praying and trusting for some one else, that 
we find the fullest gain of prayer and faith 
for ourselves. We get a new hold on every 
Bible promise or inspired word of cheer that 
we press on our needy fellows. It is only 
when our religious activities are in generous 
self- forgetfulness, that we experience their 
highest personal benefits. 

"Is thy cruse of comfort wasting? Rise and share 
it with another, 
And through all the years of famine, it shall serve 
thee and thy brother. 

M Love divine will fill thy storehouse, or thy handful 
still renew ; 
Scanty fare for one will often make a royal feast for 
two; 

"For the heart grows rich in giving; all its wealth 
is living grain. 
Seeds, which mildew in the garner, scattered, fill 
with gold the plain." 



IX. 

NOT TWO SIDES TO EVERY 
QUESTION. 



A popular notion that is as pernicious as 
it is common, is that there are two sides to 
every question, and that a person ought 
always to hear both sides, or to stop and 
consider both sides, before making up his 
mind as to the merits of the particular point 
in question. There is many a question which 
has but one side to it, first, or last, or at any 
time ; and he who does not see, at the outset, 
that a wholly one-sided question which is 
brought before him is unworthy of examin- 
ing before its answering, makes a mistake 
which is likely to hold him back from prompt 
and courageous action in an emergency, and 
which may even prove his ruin. Indeed, 
there are few more important lines of practi- 
cal division in the sphere of one's personal 

73 



74 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

life than the line which separates questions 
which have only one side to them, from those 
questions which present two sides — to choose 
between. 

Stating a proposition in the form of a ques- 
tion makes it logically possible to give an 
answer either affirmatively or negatively; but 
that does not necessarily make two sides to 
a question in the sense that it presents a case 
which calls for any deliberation or doubt as 
to the required answer. Raising a question 
in form is not raising a question in reality. 
If right and reason are both on one side of a 
given question, there is no other side that is 
worth considering ; therefore it is that practi- 
cally there are not two sides to every ques- 
tion; not two sides in the sense in which it 
is so commonly understood that there are 
two sides to every question. 

Is darkness light? Is evil good? Is the 
false the same as the true? Is meanness as 
noble as magnanimity? These are fairly 
questions in form, but they are not fair ques- 
tions in fact. No one of them has more than 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. ?$ 

one side to it. Right and reason are wholly 
on the negative side of every one of them. 
So, again, it is in many a formal question in 
the sphere of personal conduct. Is it not 
better to sacrifice one's honor than one's life? 
Is it not right to do evil in order to obtain 
good? May it not be allowable to yield to 
temptation, when the sin seems very small 
and the advantage seems very great? 

Not one of these questions should be counted 
as an open one. Not one of them ought to 
be looked at as having two sides to it — worthy 
of examining. The question itself, in every 
instance, supplies its own answer. Hesita- 
tion of mind as to the fitness of that one 
answer — that answer and that answer only — 
is the hesitation which is itself a step in the 
direction of ruin: it is a show of that double- 
mindedness which makes a man unstable in 
all his ways. To admit that a wholly one- 
sided question of personal duty has two sides 
to it, is in itself a confession of one's failure 
in personal integrity of manhood. Single- 
ness of mind in such a matter, as over against 



?6 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

double-mindedness, is a test of one's inner- 
most character. 

There are not two sides to the question, 
Is a lie ever justifiable ? The one all-dividing 
line in the universe is the line between truth 
and falsehood. God himself is truth. He 
can neither lie nor justify a lie. If God were 
to lie, he would cease to be God. That which 
would be incompatible with the very nature 
of God, God could not justify in one of his 
creatures. There cannot, therefore, be two 
sides to the question whether that which God 
could not justify is ever justifiable. 

It is not even necessary to admit that there 
are two sides to every question which may 
present itself concerning the conduct of 
another whom we are called to judge. If 
you know of a certainty that a man has been 
beating his wife, you have a right to say that 
his conduct was not that of a true man, or 
of a good husband. He may, indeed, say to 
you : " Don't think harshly of me, in view of 
the question which this raises in your mind. 
If you knew how 'aggravating* my wife 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 77 

was, you'd count me a pattern of forbear- 
ance. You know, there are two sides to 
every question." But your response to that 
suggestion would be: "No matter what was 
your provocation. You had no right to beat 
your wife. There are no two sides to that 
question. Away with the thought that such 
a point should be deliberated !" 

So, also, it ought to be when a man claims 
to have taken to drink in order to drown his 
sorrow; or to have embezzled funds commit- 
ted to his care without a thought, on his part, 
of injuring anybody; or to have betrayed the 
confidence which a friend fairly reposed in 
him ; and so in many another case. To ad- 
mit that there are two sides to the question 
whether a sin is a sin, a wrong is a wrong, 
or a meanness is a meanness, is so far an in- 
jury to the moral tone of the community 
where such an admission is made; and every 
true man has a duty of insisting that there 
are not two sides to any question of that sort. 

There are not two sides to the question 
whether we should continue unqualified trust 



78 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

to one who is worthy of our sincerest friend- 
ship, even though others may question the 
wisdom of our friendship, or even though 
appearances may, for the time being, fail to 
give evidence of his trustworthiness. Whether 
we should give our sincerest friendship to this 
one or to that one may well be a question ; 
but the friendship being given, the question 
whether that friend shall be trusted for what 
he is known to be, rather than for what he 
seems, or what others suppose him to be, is a 
question that has but one side to it. And as 
a basis of knowledge of a friend's real self, a 
loving heart is a surer foundation than a cal- 
culating head. To admit that there are two 
sides to the question whether a friend is to 
be trusted, is to put beyond question the fact 
that our friendship for him is not a reality. 

Truest of all is it that there are not two 
sides to the question whether God should be 
trusted absolutely and unfailingly — in spite 
of appearances. Because he is God, and we 
are his creatures, his ways must often be 
beyond our comprehension. Because he is 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 79 

God and we are the objects of his loving 
care, his dealings with us must all be wise 
and loving ways, whether we can now see 
them to be so or not. The reasons for God's 
action may often be in question. Their rea- 
sonableness can never be so. What though 
all these things seem against us? Shall not 
the Judge of all the earth do right? Though 
he slay us, yet should we trust in him. The 
duty of a never-swerving confidence in God 
on our part is never fairly a question. The 
fact of such a faith on our part too often is 
a question. 

When an anxious father brought his 
demon-possessed son to Jesus, and cried out, 
" If thou canst do anything, have compassion 
on us, and help us," the answer of Jesus was, 
in substance, Whether I am able and ready 
to help you is a question that has but one 
side to it. Whether you can trust me to help 
you, is a question that has two sides to it. If 
/ can, is not a question. If you can, is a 
question. "Straightway the father of the 
child cried out, and said, I believe; help 



80 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

thou mine unbelief." Then there was only- 
one side to either of those questions — as to 
the loving power of Jesus, or as to the loving 
faith of the needy petitioner. 

Lord, help us all to know which questions 
have but one side to them, and not to count 
those questions as questions ! 



X. 

CHOOSING WHILE NOT CHOOSING. 



All of us have our longings for that which 
is still beyond our grasp. We are full of 
wishings and cravings; and oh, if we could 
but find a way of securing the objects of our 
heart's desire! Some of us long for health, 
others of us for wealth, yet others for love 
or for friendship, for honors, for reputation, 
for wisdom and learning. None of us have 
everything that we could wish for. Yet with 
all this similarity of unsatisfied craving among 
us, there are very different measures and 
standards in our expectations and purposes 
of the future, with regard to the possible 
attainment of our chief desires. 

There are three ways of looking at life. 

We may take a fatalistic view of it, believing 

that what is to be will be, and that we cannot 

do better than school ourselves to a grim 
6 81 



82 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

resignation to the resistless and inevitable 
sweep of events. Again, we may confine 
ourselves to a selfly-practical view of life, 
and believe that our future is wholly depend- 
ent on our own exertions, so that, if we are 
to gain what we long for, it must be by our 
self-reliant and our self-persistent endeavors. 
Yet another view of life is that which sees in 
the control of all events the hand of a loving 
and an all-powerful Father, who wants his 
children to tell him freely of their wishings 
and cravings, and who will then decide for 
his children, according to his knowledge of 
their truest interests, all things concerned. 
This third view is the only really Christian 
view of life. What a pity that it is not the 
only view of life taken by Christians! 

The call of God to his children is con- 
tinually, "Ask what I shall give thee;" 
"Ask, and it shall be given you;" "All 
things whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, 
believing, ye shall receive." And in response 
to this call of God, the true child of God is 
continually choosing, while not choosing — 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 83 

choosing while he will not choose — in the 
matter of his heart longings, as he looks 
God-ward in prayer. He knows what he 
longs for, but he is not sure that he knows 
what is best for him ; so, while his choice is 
naturally in the direction of his longings, he 
wants God to choose that which he himself 
would choose if he saw the case as God sees 
it. He chooses to take what he craves, — if 
God sees that it is best for him to have that 
object of his craving; but he is unwilling to 
make an absolute choice — however strong 
are his yearnings in a given direction — while 
God alone is competent to decide as to the 
real desirableness of the thing desired. And 
so the choices of the true-hearted Christian 
believer are ever by choosing while not 
choosing, as he makes known his requests 
unto God. 

A gentleman who had consulted a skilled 
and trusted physician concerning his bodily 
health was told that there were in his system 
the seeds of a disease which would ultimately 
destroy his life, yet w r hich might be battled 



84 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

with successfully for years by careful and 
judicious treatment. At once that gentle- 
man's attitude toward questions of diet and 
exercise and occupation was very different 
from before. And his conscious need of 
wise guidance from his physician was far 
greater. 

Soon after that first disclosure of his real 
condition and danger, he sat down at a well- 
spread table in company with his physician- 
friend. Looking over the table, he saw more 
than one tempting dish, for a taste of which 
he had a longing, but he dared not choose 
for himself among the objects of his choice. 
He said to his physician: "Now, Doctor, I 
want you to decide for me just what I am to 
eat and drink. You know better than I do 
what is good for me. I want to follow your 
counsel, rather than my own longings." 
That was choosing while not choosing. It 
was not that the gentleman had no prefer- 
ences of his own ; he had very decided pref- 
erences; but it was that, back of his prefer- 
ences for particular dishes before him, he had 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 85 

a higher preference for his greater good, 
concerning which his physician's knowledge 
could be trusted as his own could not be. 
Therefore he would not choose for himself 
in matters of his own impulsive choosing. 

A patient puts himself under a surgeon's 
care for professional examination and treat- 
ment. He says, to begin with : " I hope you 
won't hurt me, Doctor." The surgeon's 
answer is: "But what if I can't help you 
without hurting you?" "Oh! then you 
must hurt me; for I want to be helped, even 
if I have to be hurt in the helping." There 
is choosing while not choosing; choosing 
relief from pain, if relief be safe as well as 
practicable, but not choosing relief from pain 
if pain be a necessity, as a means to perma- 
nent cure. So, stage by stage, under the 
surgeon's treatment. The sharp knife of the 
surgeon causes the flesh to wince, and the 
patient's choice is, "No more of that;" yet 
that longing choice is in abeyance, if another 
stroke of the knife be the price of life and 
hope. Choosing while not choosing, all the 



86 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

way along, when the choice is obviously of 
the weaker nature, and the alternative rests 
with one who knows and who loves beyond 
our own possible attainment of capability to 
judge for ourselves in the premises. 

And if this be so in our trust of an earthly 
counselor, wherever our bodily health or our 
mortal life is involved, why should it not be 
the same in our trust of an all-wise and an 
all-loving Father, wherever our material as 
well as our spiritual interests are involved — 
beyond our limits of knowledge, even though 
not beyond our limits of longing? We wish 
for freedom from poverty; but what if pov- 
erty be best for us ? We wish for full health ; 
but what if sickness be to our advantage? 
We wish for love or friendship, for favor or 
renown; but what if desolateness and dis- 
favor be the only state in which we can gain 
and grow in the likeness of God, and into the 
possibilities of his highest plans in our behalf? 
We wish for the prolonged life of one dearer 
to us than life; but what if God sees it to be 
better for that dear one, and for ourselves, 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 87 

that death should now intervene between us 
and that one so dear? We wish for an end 
to this endless struggle of unsatisfied desire; 
but what if, in God's sight, our safety and our 
hope are dependent on our struggling unceas- 
ingly? Dare we choose as to these things, 
even though our human hearts do choose in 
them, each and all, continually? We choose 
while we do not choose. God knows the 
choice of our longing natures, and God 
knows also the choice of our heart of 
hearts, below our innermost human nature. 

What an illustration of choosing w T hile not 
choosing is given to us in that midnight 
prayer of our Lord in Gethsemane! "O my 
Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
away from me: nevertheless, not as I will, 
but as thou wilt." And so again the second 
time and the third time — "the same words" 
of choosing while not choosing. "Have 
this mind in you, which was also in Christ 
Jesus." 

The whole life of many an intense and 
faith-filled child of God is a struggle between 



88 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

choosing and not choosing. The entire 
human nature longs for that which seems 
to be, not only a possibility, but also a truly 
desirable attainment; while the consciously 
dependent soul, within, cries out to God to 
decide as he sees to be best, even in that for 
which the nature longs so earnestly. "If it 
be best," is the prayer; "and oh! do let it 
be best!' The heart-cry, with the reluctant 
faith - qualifying "if"! "My longing thou 
knowest, O Lord; that longing, I long for; 
but, but, thy will — not my will, but thy 
will — be done; since thy will is surely 
guided by a love and a knowledge beyond 
my own." 

" Choose for us, Lord ! nor let our weak preferring 
Cheat our poor souls of good thou hast designed ; 
Choose for us, Lord ! thy wisdom is unerring, 
And we are fools and blind.* * 



XL 

THE CREDULITY OF UNBELIEF. 



It is often charged against the firm be- 
liever in God, and in the Bible as the Word 
of God, that such a belief involves a large 
measure of credulity. And there are many 
who pride themselves on their freedom from 
credulousness, as evidenced in their refusal 
to believe in the personality of God, or in 
any explicit revelation of God to man. Yet 
it is a simple matter of fact, that the beliefs 
which are held to-day by many scientific and 
critical scholars who refuse to accept the 
Bible as the direct result of Divine inspira- 
tion, and as the record of a revelation from 
God, involve a larger measure of credulity 
than would be necessary for the full accept- 
ance of the Christian scheme — even on its 
face as a reasonable view of truth. 

Modern science discloses a system and a 

89 



90 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

progression in the order of nature, which are 
every way consistent with the idea of an In- 
finite Mind as the source of all that is. Mod- 
ern science fails to find the possibility of even 
the lowest conceivable form of animal life, 
save as the outcome of a prior form of 
animal life. Yet many a modern scientist 
believes that life itself, and the entire order 
of the universe, somehow came to be, and 
keeps on being, as the result of a primal 
senseless-wriggle, and of a spontaneous un- 
directed movement of soulless matter. What 
credulity is shown in this belief, compared 
with that simple faith in God as the Author 
of life and as the Creator of the universe, 
which is exercised by him who accepts the 
Bible view of God and of the works of God ! 
Modern science shows that the one invari- 
able distinction between the lowest type of 
mankind and the highest type of the inferior 
animals, is in man's capacity to conceive of 
spiritual existences as such, and to imagine 
the possibility of a revelation from the Great 
Unseen. Modern research shows that no 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 9 1 

race of men has fallen so low, and that no 
race of men has risen so high, as to be with- 
out a belief in the existence of God, or of 
gods, or as to reject the thought of com- 
munication with the Divine. Yet there are 
scientists who believe that a man's glory as 
a reasonable being consists in his refusal to 
exercise the one capacity of his nature which 
distinguishes him from the brute; or who, 
again, believe that if there be a God he is 
somehow the Great Unknowable, incapable 
of revealing himself, or a knowledge of him- 
self, to mankind. 

Refusing to accept the Bible record of 
God's revelation of himself to primitive man, 
as fully accounting for the beliefs and the 
perversions of belief concerning God among 
the various races of mankind, such scien- 
tists endeavor to account for these universal 
conceptions of God, as a natural evolution 
of ideas from the customs of pre-human 
animal existence. Thus Herbert Spencer, 
one of the finest specimens of the scientific 
credulous unbeliever, actually suggests that 



92 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

the ordinary salutations of mankind are de- 
velopments of the customs of brutes. In an 
African tribe's habit of a man's throwing 
himself on his back and rolling from side 
to side, while slapping his thighs with his 
hands, Spencer finds a survival of a little 
dog's custom of throwing itself on its back 
with its legs in the air, when before a su- 
perior dog. And kissing as a social custom 
— as he views it — had its start in a dog's 
habit of licking one whom he liked. Was 
there ever such credulity as this, on the part 
of a believer in the Bible as a revelation 
from God? 

Modern science has overturned the theories 
of former scientists as to the order of crea- 
tion, and as to the history of the primitive 
human race; and it has approached more 
and more nearly to a complete verification of 
the record of that order and of that history 
in the early chapters of Genesis. Yet there 
are scientists and critics who actually believe 
that the origin of those chapters was in the 
wild fancies of primitive man's brain, and 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 93 

that, without any revelation from God, or 
any guidance of Divine inspiration, that 
record, in its simplicity, in its comprehen- 
siveness, and in its marvelous correctness, was 
so made up in the long-gone centuries, as to 
shine only the clearer and the brighter in 
the light of the fullest scientific research of 
to-day. To accept this theory of the origin 
of Genesis, requires a measure of credulity 
transcending any which has been charged 
upon the simplest-hearted believer in the 
infallibility of the text of that book. 

Modern research finds, practically all the 
world over, a tradition of a departed golden 
day of man's primal purity, and a hope of an 
ultimate restoration of such a day. In ancient 
Egypt the serpent represents the embodi- 
ment of evil, and a struggle with that ser- 
pent is the chiefest work of the pre-eminent 
son of the gods. In India the thousand- 
headed serpent is a means of destroying the 
very world itself, at the close of each dis- 
tinctive eon. In primitive North America, 
the serpent figures as a source of evil to all 



94 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

who share its nature or who feel its power. 
And these are but specimens of a world-wide 
similarity of symbolism. The idea of a tree 
of life is, again, as nearly universal in the 
race as that of the evil-symbolizing serpent. 

Accepting the Bible story of Eden, and 
the fall of man, and the promises of redemp- 
tion, as an inspired record of truth, — whether 
the references to the serpent and the tree as 
such are understood as Divinely intended to 
be taken by the reader in exclusive literal- 
ness, or as fitting symbolisms of the truth, — 
all these perverted traditions of that primal 
truth are simple and natural. But there are 
scientists and critics who actually believe that 
primitive men everywhere — howsoever cir- 
cumstanced or trained — happened to imagine 
almost precisely the same state of things, as 
to the beginning of evil in their race, with 
the employment of the same symbols of the 
serpent of evil and the tree of life. It re- 
quires wonderful credulity to be one of that 
class of unbelievers. 

Modern research has brought to light the 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 95 

so-called sacred books of the principal reli- 
gions of the ages, and has laid them in com- 
parison with the Bible as the Book of books. 
Not one of those books can be said, even by 
its warmest Christian admirers, to contain a 
single new truth ; to be free from the teach- 
ing of gross error; to have a trustworthy 
historic value; or even to be composed in 
large part of other matter than puerile absur- 
dities. The best that can be said of any one 
of them is, that it contains vestiges of primal 
truth. Yet there are both scientists and 
critics who speak of those books as if they 
had a similar origin to that Book which fur- 
nishes in itself the proofs of its Divine ori- 
gin, and which in its substance commands 
the admiration of the loftiest human intel- 
lect, while its spiritual teachings satisfy the 
uttermost longings of the holiest human soul. 
The credulity which would put any one of 
the ethnic sacred books on a corresponding 
plane with the Bible is a marvel of marvels. 

An unreasonable credulity is essential to 
an acceptance of the principal beliefs of the 



g6 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

unbelieving scientist and critic of to-day. A 
reasonable faith is all that is required of one 
who believes in God, and in the Bible as the 
Word of God. It is reasonable to believe 
that God is the Creator of all things. It is 
reasonable to believe that God, having created 
man with a capacity to conceive of his Maker, 
should make a revelation of himself to man. 
It is reasonable to believe that such a revela- 
tion of God, and of man's origin and des- 
tiny, as is found in the Bible as it stands, is 
the truth without any admixture of error. 
Credulity and faith stand over against each 
other for our choice. 

Man by searching cannot find out God. 
God by revelation discloses himself to man. 
" For seeing that in the wisdom of God the 
world through its wisdom knew not God, it 
was God's good pleasure through the fool- 
ishness [or the simplicity] of the preaching 
[or the heralding of God's revelation of him- 
self] to save them that believe/' 



XII. 

GENTLENESS AS A FORCE. 



We are prone to think of gentleness as a 
negative rather than as a positive quality; 
as a passive quality which wins love, rather 
than as an active quality which commands 
submission. We are not accustomed to count 
gentleness among the potent forces of the 
universe. Yet, as a matter of fact, no force 
in all the universe has greater or more wide- 
reaching potency than gentleness. Gentle- 
ness is God's great power. Gentleness is the 
force of forces in material nature. Gentle- 
ness is a pre-eminent force in human char- 
acter and in human action. 

It was when the Lord would evidence his 
power for the encouragement of his disheart- 
ened prophet Elijah, at Horeb, that he em- 
phasized the contrast between the force of 
violence and the force of gentleness in the 
7 97 



98 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

ordinary workings of his providence. " And, 
behold, the Lord passed by, and a great and 
strong wind rent the mountains, and brake 
in pieces the rocks before the Lord; but the 
Lord was not in the wind : and after the wind 
an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the 
earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; 
but the Lord was not in the fire: and after 
the fire a sound of gentle stillness" (for that 
is the literal rendering of the Hebrew, as 
given by our Revisers in the margin of the 
text). And then, as many a time since that 
day, a sense of God's reserved omnipotence 
came, in the " sound of gentle stillness" per- 
vading that wilderness of mountain-sea; for 
it is a noteworthy fact that traveler after trav- 
eler through that desert realm of Horeb has 
testified to the awe-inspiring impressiveness 
of the peculiar silence of the mountain-fast- 
nesses of Sinai: 

" A silence as if God in heaven were still, 
And meditating some new wonder." 

" Thy gentleness hath made me great," says 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 99 

David, in his recounting of the forces of 
God's providence; and this declaration of 
the power of Divine gentleness is the climax 
of David's recital of the forces of the uni- 
verse, in the floods, the earthquakes, the hail- 
stones, the coals of fire, the lightnings, and 
the whirlwind. Above these all comes the 
crowning force of gentleness. 

" The gentleness of all the gods go with thee " 

is Shakespeare's expression of a wish for 
power to another in meeting the adverse 
forces which must be encountered. Indeed, 
there is no force so god-like as the force of 
gentleness. Nor is any force so potent even 
in the visible world of nature. When the 
stoutest ships of oak or iron are helpless 
against the rush of the whirlwind and the 
lashing of the mountain waves, the gentle 
flow of oil upon the stormy waters will 
silently and surely crush into placid submis- 
siveness the surface of the angry ocean ; as 
if it were hushed to quiet by the all-potent 
sound of gentle stillness. 



IOO PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

" A gentle hand may lead an elephant with 
a hair/' says a Persian proverb, in illus- 
tration of the force of gentleness. And 
Shakespeare pictures the twofold power of 
gentleness in a scene in "As You Like It," 
where the Duke would first have resisted the 
sword-enforced appeal of the brave Orlando, 
but is won by Orlando's gentleness, and is 
prompted to say: 

" What would you have ? Your gentleness shall force 
More than your force move me to gentleness." 

Whereupon Orlando himself is subdued, and 
responds : 

" Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you: 
I thought that all things had been savage here ; 
And therefore I put on the countenance 
Of stern commandment." 

And his final suggestion of the force of gen- 
tleness is : 

" Let gentleness my strong enforcement be : 
In the which hope I blush, and hide my sword." 

What, in fact, do we mean by a " gentle- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. IOI 

man/' but a man who is born with superior 
powers, a man whose gens — whose birthright 
stock — places him above his base-born fel- 
lows? The very etymology of the word 
" gentle," as applied to a man (or to a woman 
as well; for, in the days of Chaucer and 
Spenser the term gent was pre-eminently the 
designation of a true woman's best womanli- 
ness), connects it with inborn genius and 
genuineness and generosity. Primarily a 
gentle-man is a man whose very nature is 
uplifted above the common standard of hu- 
manity, and who has superior force ac- 
cordingly; even as Jesus himself has been 
designated : 

" The first true gentleman that ever breathed.'* 

And this, although the term itself has often 
become so degraded, in the degradations of 
humanity: 

" The grand old name of gentleman 
Defamed by every charlatan, 
And soil'd with all ignoble use." 

Even with all its limitations in the popular 



102 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

conception of the term, " gentleness " has 
never acquired the taint of an evil report. 
While often improperly looked upon as ex- 
pressive of a passive, if not indeed of a nega- 
tive, virtue, it has never been counted an 
ignoble attribute. 

Contrasting the two words "gentle" and 
"tame," Crabbesays: "In the moral applica- 
tion, gentle is always employed in the good, 
and tame in the bad, sense: a gentle spirit 
needs no control, it amalgamates freely [when 
it so chooses] with the will of another : a tame 
spirit is without any will of its own; it is 
alive to nothing but submission. . . . Gentle 
bespeaks something positively good; tame 
bespeaks the want of an essential good: the 
former is allied to the kind, the latter to 
the abject and mean, qualities — which natu- 
rally flow from the compression or destructi(?n 
of energy and will in the agent." Gentle- 
ness is everywhere recognized as consistent 
with great strength and force of character, 
even though it be not always counted as an 
evidence of it — as in truth it might be. 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 103 

Unless, indeed, a strong man has the power 
of gentleness — has it by nature or has it by 
acquisition — he falls short of the highest at- 
tainable force of character, whatever other 
attributes of power he possesses. Of course, 
there must first be the elements of real 
strength in the man, before the force of gen- 
tleness — or any other force — is a possibility 
to him. If there were nothing of the whirl- 
wind, of the earthquake, or of the fire, in a 
man's composition, the sound of a stillness in 
his case might be the sound of a tame still- 
ness, instead of the sound of a gentle stillness. 
Hence it follows that there is sometimes a 
force in a man of violence beyond the force of 
a man of negative quietness. But wherever 
the other attributes of power are in existence, 
the power of gentleness — the power of a 
gentle stillness — in the control of those attri- 
butes is the nearest possible approach to the 
force of omnipotence. In this sense it is that 

" He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty ; 
And he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh 
a city." 



104 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

He who has whirlwind, earthquake, and fire, 
in his nature, and keeps them all in gentle 
control, is better than he who violently em- 
ploys these agencies of power; and he who 
exhibits a strong spirit in unfailing gentle- 
ness is more of a man than he who can point 
to a city subjugated by his violence. 

Gentleness always indicates, it certainly 
always suggests, a reserve of controlled pow- 
ers. The unvarying gentleness, for example, 
of General Grant as a military commander, 
was a result of his marvelous self-control; 
and the fact that he never, even for a moment, 
allowed the whirlwind, the earthquake, and 
the fire of his composition to overmaster the 
sound of gentle stillness in his words, and in 
his manner of command, made him the force 
that he was over those even who might have 
been his equal in the power to capture a city. 

It is a well-known fact that Wendell Phillips, 
as an orator, carried the art of gentleness in 
his oratory to such an extent that his gentle- 
ness of manner became the force of forces in 
his peerless control over an audience of those 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 105 

who differed with him most radically in all 
the wild propositions he was bringing down 
upon them with the smoothness of oil-pour- 
ing on a stormy ocean. And so in every 
realm of conflict and of conquest: 

" Mightiest powers by deepest calms are fed ; 
They sleep, how oft, in things that gentlest be." 

It is not as a sign of her weakness, but as 
a token of her strength, that gentleness is 
recognized as a pre-eminent attribute of truest 
womanhood. It is in heartiest praise of his 
murdered daughter Cordelia that King Lear 
moans out: 

" Her voice was ever soft, 
Gentle, and low, an excellent thing in woman." 

It is in assurance of her power of loving con- 
trol that Longfellow sings of the model wife: 

" Sail forth into the sea of life, 
O gentle, loving, trusting wife, 
And safe from all adversity 
Upon the bosom of that sea 
Thy comings and thy goings be ! 
For gentleness and love and trust 
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust." 



106 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Everywhere and always the surest proof 
of inborn nobleness in womanly nature is 
given in a gentle voice; and the highest at- 
tainment of womanly force is found and is 
exhibited in a gentle spirit and in unfailing 
gentleness of manners. Nor is gentleness the 
noblest attribute and attainment of womanly 
character alone; it is equally the crowning 
grace of the strong man's power. Only he 
who has strength of character can be gentle. 
Only in gentleness is true strength of char- 
acter exhibited most forcefully. The gentle- 
man is, in fact, the man who has a sense and 
a responsibility of power in all his words 
and deeds. He neither storms nor cringes ; 
neither claims nor yields unduly; but he is 
gently quiet, and he is gently firm, at all 
times. He is ever one of those who can say 
in frank simplicity: 

" We are gentlemen 
That neither in our hearts, nor outward eyes, 
Envy the great, nor do the low despise;" 

and he is also one who as "the Lord's ser- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 107 

vant," and as a servant of only the Lord, will 
"be gentle towards all," and so will be a force 
with and above all. 

To be a born gentle-man or a born gentle- 
woman is something to be grateful for. To 
have the force of gentleness of spirit and 
gentleness of manner, by nature or by choice, 
is to be superior to commonplace humanity. 
But gentleness by birth or by training must 
be proven in present personal exhibit, and 
not by any family register of ancestral de- 
scent. If you are gentle, others will know 
it without your saying so. If you lack gen- 
tleness, you can never have the force to make 
others think that you possess it. Hence it 
should be your aim to be gentle, and so to 
prove your gentleness : 

" Nor stand so much on your gentility, 
Which is an airy, and mere borrowed thing 
From dead men's bones, and none of yours, — 
Except you make, or hold, it." 

Gentleness requires power, shows power, 
is power. To have gentleness unfailingly is 
to be so far the possessor and the exhibitor 



108 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

of that "wisdom that is from above" which 
"is first pure, then peaceable [peace-seeking], 
gentle, easy to be entreated, full of mercy 
and good fruits, without variance, without 
hypocrisy. ,, Some of us have wellnigh all 
other elements of power in excess of the 
matchless force of gentleness. Our lack of 
gentleness is so far a lack of grace. 



XIII. 
HAVING STRENGTH TO BE WEAK. 



It takes more strength to be weak than 

to be strong; and the highest exercise of 

strength is to refrain from exercising strength. 

The lowest exhibit of great strength is the 

senseless show of strength in a brute. The 

grandest exhibit of strength the world has 

ever seen is the strength which was shown 

by the mighty Son of God when he humbled 

himself into the likeness of man, and became 

a helpless babe with a life of suffering and a 

death of shame before him. And no grander 

exhibit of strength was made in all that life 

of voluntary and triumphant weakness, than 

when the Strong One stood as one weak, 

oppressed and afflicted, opening not his 

mouth in complaint or rebuke, when the 

faintest whisper from those closed lips 

could have brought legions of angels for 

109 



I IO PRA CTICAL PARADOXES. 

his rescue and defense! According as we 
are willing to be weak at the call of God, 
and as we have strength to be weak when 
weakness is our duty, do we rise above the 
level of the brutes, and approach the spirit 
of Him whose strength was made perfect in 
weakness. 

Even the very brute gains a glory that 
lifts it above the brutes when it has strength 
to overcome its strength; when it proves 
itself strong enough to become weak in 
obedience to a sentiment The lion is more 
honored to-day in song and story for its 
willingness to be weak on an occasion than 
for its ability to be strong at all times. The 
lion showing itself gentle before Una as the 
very lamb which had followed her, is more 
kingly among beasts than the lion tearing 
his prey in pieces in the desert jungle. 

It was more than a lion's strength that the 
lion showed when, instead of striking down 
the Roman slave who had invaded his lair, 
he exhibited the virtue of a trustful weakness 
by laying his paw in the hand of Androclus, 



PR A CTICAL PARA D OXES. 1 1 1 

that a thorn might be extracted from it. 
And that same lion was stronger and grander 
than ever when, bounding out of his prison- 
cage into the Roman arena in the madness 
of his enforced hunger, the strength of his 
remembered gratitude was such that he 
bowed himself in weakness at the feet of 
the man who had befriended him, and who 
was now put before him as his victim. It 
would have been easier for the lion of Una, 
or the lion of Androclus, to have shown its 
native strength in the exercise of strength; 
but because those lions had strength enough 
to refuse to use their strength, they also are 
taken as types of the highest strength made 
perfect in weakness — whether, indeed, that 
strength be moral, or merely muscular. 

Even in the realm of mechanical forces 
there is recognized the superiority of the 
power to employ weight and motion as 
though they were weak, rather than as 
though they were strong. The machinist 
points with pride to the fact that his mighty 
steam-hammer, which could crush a bar of 



1 1 2 PR A CTICAL PARA D OXES. 

iron with a single blow, can be brought down 
so gently to its steel bed that it may rest on 
a child's finger without harming it. And if 
this be so in the sphere of mechanics, how 
much more in the sphere of mind and morals. 

Two classic groups of ancient sculpture 
stand over against each other, as illustrating 
the superior strength of weakness — where an 
exhibit of strength except in weakness would 
be only hopeless folly. At Rome stands the 
struggling Laocoon; father and sons, in fruit- 
less contortions, wasting their dying strength 
in vain contest with the encircling serpent- 
folds. Who ever looked into the tortured 
face of that resisting father with any thought 
of admiration or reverence ? impossible though 
it be to view it without profoundest pity. 

But in Florence is another group of parent 
and offspring facing death together, which 
brings a very different impression to the be- 
holder. It is Niobe, the Theban queen, and 
her dying children. Who, having once seen 
that mother's face, can fail of reverent admi- 
ration for the strength there made perfect in 



PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 1 1 3 

weakness? The sentence of death to her 
children has gone forth from the gods, and it 
is being put in execution before her sight. 
She makes no vain resistance in her agony. 
She is strong enough to be weak in such an 
hour. And the strength of her weakness in 
that unparalleled trial is the matchless charm 
of this latter group. 

An art critic gives the lesson of Niobe 
proving her strength to be weak, as he tells 
the story simply: — "While with her right 
hand she presses her flying child to her with 
a mother's anguish, and bends lovingly over 
the shelterless one, she turns her proud head 
upward, and looks toward the avenging god- 
dess with a glance in which deep agony 
and true nobleness of soul are wonderfully 
mingled ; not to beseech her to have mercy 
(for she knows that she will find no sympa- 
thy) ; not to express defiance (for all defiance 
would be here but a sign of impotence); but 
to submit herself with heroic resignation — 
however she may be stricken with despair — 
to the inevitable. In this one figure lies an 



1 1 4 PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 

atonement for all the terrible anguish that 
surrounds her. In her sublime bearing, in 
the true antique majesty with which she en- 
dures her fate, she raises us to that pure height 
of sympathy to which the tragedy of the an- 
cients likewise carries us;" — and she teaches 
us anew how much stronger than the stron- 
gest strength is the patient weakness of endur- 
ance in its place. 

It is harder to be weak than to be strong. 
It is harder to submit passively than to resist 
vigorously. The part of the struggling Lao- 
coon is far easier than the part of the patiently 
enduring Niobe. Prometheus could joy in 
his wildest contests with the gods; but bound 
in helpless weakness on the rock, his cry must 

be: 

" Yet this curse 
Which strikes me now, I find it hard to brave 
In silence." 

It is often harder to do an easy thing than a 
hard one, as others than Naaman have come 
to realize. The lesser thing is many a time 
the greater one. 



PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 1 1 5 

" Many, if God should make them kings, 
Might not disgrace the throne he gave. 
How few who could as well fulfil 
The holier office of a slave ! 

" I hold him great who, for love's sake, 
Can give with generous, earnest will — 
Yet he who takes for love's sweet sake, 
I think I hold more generous still." 

Who would say that it required less strength 
to lie unmoved under the thrusts of the sur- 
geon's knife, than to resist its cuttings with 
the wrestlings of an athlete? Who does not 
see that it would be more of a triumph of 
strength for a child or a woman to rest pas- 
sively in the grasp of a strong swimmer in 
the buffeting waves, than for the endangered 
one to double the danger by fruitless smug- 
glings? Who can doubt that the highest 
attainment of spiritual strength is shown in 
spiritual submissiveness ? It is only when a 
soul is truly strong — 

" Strong in the strength which God supplies 
Through his eternal Son" — 

that that soul can be restfully weak at the call 



1 1 6 PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 

of God. Only then can its song of submis- 
siveness be, in all sincerity: 

" Pain's furnace-heat within me quivers, 
God's breath upon the fire doth blow, 

And all my heart in anguish shivers, 
And trembles at the fiery glow ; 

And yet I whisper, 'As God will ! ' 

And in his hottest fire hold still. 

" He comes and lays my heart, all heated, 
On the bare anvil, minded so 
Into his own fair shape to beat it, 

With his great hammer, blow on blow ; 
And yet I whisper, 'As God will ! ' 
And at his heaviest blows hold still." 

How much easier it would be for an endur- 
ing wife to speak out in protestation or re- 
proach, when suffering under a brutal hus- 
band's injustice or neglect, than to repress all 
show of strength — even strength of deep feel- 
ing — and to bear in uncomplaining weakness 
the trials of her sad lot. Yet that strength, 
which the patient wife shows in her refusal to 
show her strength, is the power which finally 
brings many a husband's hard heart into soft- 



PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 1 1 7 

ened subjection, and which in every instance 
gives a glow of glory to the strongly weak 
and saintly woman. 

In the strongest man, the compressed lip 
and the pallid cheek, which tell of a deter- 
mined purpose neither to strike nor to speak 
under the bitterest provocation, are signs of 
greater strength than could be exhibited in 
the biting tongue of his sarcasm, or in the arm 
uplifted for a merited castigation. Resenting 
an insult by a blow is the impulse of the 
ruder nature rather than of the finer; and the 
courage and strength to refrain from giving 
or accepting a challenge to deadly combat as 
a means of defending one's honor, are a result 
and a proof of progress in true Christian 
civilization, and away from the customs of 
barbarism. 

It is in every-day life that we find the duty of 
being weak when we would like to be strong, 
and that we find how much more strength 
it takes to be weak than it takes to be strong. 
We must be quiet when we want to be active ; 
we must be silent when we want to speak 



1 1 8 PRA CTICAL PARADOXES. 

out; we must just wait, and do nothing but 
wait, when it seems that unless we do some- 
thing more than wait we shall die. 

Daily and hourly the word of God comes 
to us anew: "In quietness and confidence 
shall be your strength;" and "In your pa- 
tience possess ye your souls." Well for us 
it is when we have come to that strength 
of faith which enables us to say, each for him- 
self: " Most gladly therefore will I rather glory 
in my weaknesses, that the power of Christ 
may rest upon me. Wherefore I take pleasure 
in weaknesses, in injuries, in necessities, in 
persecutions, in distresses, for Christ's sake: 
for when I am weak then am I strong." 



XIV. 

HOLDING BACK AS A MEANS 
OF PROGRESS. 



All stability and all advancement in the 
realm of matter are dependent on, if not an 
immediate result of, contending or of coun- 
teracting forces, or of contention or of coun- 
ter-action in forces. Attraction and repulsion, 
pressure and resistance, pushing forward and 
holding back, keep the universe in equilib- 
rium, and control the movements of the uni- 
verse. There is, in fact, no material power 
which does not gain its efficiency through an 
opposing material power — even though the 
opposition may be from another phase of the 
force which evokes it. 

" Resistance is the parent of light/' Cen- 
trifugal force and centripetal force are over 
against each other in keeping the planets in 

their course. Even a uniform attraction like 

119 



120 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

that of gravitation, or a uniform pressure 
like that of the atmosphere, will work in op- 
posite directions on the same body, in order 
to the preservation of the atoms of that body 
from the exclusive sway of the tendency to 
cohere or to disintegrate. Gravitation holds 
the walls of a building in their place, and, 
again, gravitation overturns those walls. At- 
mospheric pressure forms the bubble, and 
atmospheric pressure bursts it. 

It is the constraint of the iron bounds of 
the cannon-chamber that gives the expand- 
ing powder its resistless force in hurling the 
mightiest projectile in seeming defiance of 
the forces of gravitation and of atmospheric 
pressure. It is the binding constraint of the 
boiler and the cylinder that gives to the strug- 
gling steam its power to whirl the ponderous 
locomotive and its following train over the 
face of the rail-ribbed country, or to push on 
the enormous vessel through sea and storm 
from shore to shore the world around. It is, 
indeed, only as a large measure of constraint 
or of resistance is secured, that a large meas- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 121 

ure of power of progress is made possible in 
any portion of the realm of matter. 

As it is in the material world, so also in 
the mental and moral world. Resistance is 
essential to power; constraint is necessary as 
a means of progress. As a rule, man's suc- 
cess in subduing the forces of nature is great- 
est where the resistance is largest ; and man 
shows himself the master of nature rather in 
the rugged and sterile regions of the earth 
than amid the abounding luxuriance of the 
tropics. So, also, it is the rule that the de- 
velopment of animal life is most rapid where 
its grade is lowest, and is greatest where its 
advancement is most gradual and tedious. 
The tiny moth comes to useless maturity and 
to death in a day. The kitten makes prog- 
ress more slowly, and also more exten- 
sively. All the way along the scale of being 
the measure of intellectual attainment cor- 
responds with the retarding of its maturity. 
Man, who is at the summit of animal crea- 
tion, is in a state of helpless dependence for 
as many months as the calf or the colt is 



122 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

days, or the chicken is hours. And the 
higher man rises in the scale of manhood, 
the longer is the period of his infancy and 
childhood; the child of the savage being capa- 
ble of providing for himself at an age when 
the child of an advanced civilization must still 
be guarded and ministered to by nurses. 

The truest preparation for high intellectual 
pursuits is in the disciplining of the intel- 
lectual faculties by an enforced constraint 
within the limits of special studies, against 
which the primary instincts and the passing 
fancies of the student's mind incline to rebel. 
Not until a student has learned how to give 
his whole being to application or to research 
contrary to his natural inclination, is a stu- 
dent capable of application or of research to 
the best advantage in the line of his inclina- 
tion. And he who studies only what he likes 
to study, and only when he enjoys studying, 
can never make such progress in the direc- 
tion of even such study, as can his fellow, of 
equal native capacity with himself, who turns, 
by his own will, or who is turned by a sense 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 23 

of duty or of enforcing circumstances, in that 
direction after he has gained the power of 
working effectively against his impulses and 
preferences, and who, by holding all his in- 
tellectual powers in control, has gained the 
control of all his intellectual powers. 

As a rule, the longer a man is in wise prepa- 
ration for his special life work, the more 
effective he is in the prosecution of that work 
when he is fairly at it. He who leaves school 
early, or who refuses to take time for a col- 
lege education when he might have it if he 
would, in order to gain an early start in some 
business pursuit, is likely, at the end of ten 
years or more, to be behind his competitor 
who held back from his start in that business 
long enough to be prepared by added educa- 
tion for more rapid progress when at length 
he was engaged in it. This principle it is that 
is the basis of the classic counsel, " Hasten 
slowly," and of the suggestion of the Quran, 
" Haste is of the Devil," as well as of the later 
proverbs, "Wisely and slow," and "The more 
haste, the worse speed." 



124 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

In every sphere of life this gain of holding 
back as a means of progress is continually 
showing itself. The man who is promptest 
to answer every question put to him without 
a moment for preliminary reflection ; the man 
who is always readiest to speak in any delib- 
erative assembly of which he is a member; 
the man who is ever freest to write on any 
subject of popular or of special interest; the 
man who invariably says all that he can say, 
or all that he thinks, on any occasion or in 
any presence; the man who is uniformly 
sure to" act at once with his fullest energies 
in the direction of his mental prompting; the 
man who never holds in and who never holds 
back, in thought, in speech, or in action; the 
man of no reserve power and of no constraint 
of self; — such a man is never the one who 
does himself most credit, who makes great- 
est personal progress, who impresses himself 
most upon those about him, or who is surest 
to be a leader of his fellows in the line of 
true progress. 

There is no pre-eminence in any sphere 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 25 

without reserve power; there is no reserve 
power without constraint. He who expends 
all of his personal feeling in a word of com- 
mand, of reproach, or of censure, has no 
such power in his utterance as he who mani- 
festly speaks in that line under the pressure 
of an enforced constraint. He who is un- 
able to control himself in any discussion until 
all that can be said on the other side has 
been heard and carefully weighed by him, 
can never sway his hearers as he might 
through such a wisely constrained delay in 
his speaking. He who hastens to bring out 
before the public the results of his thinking 
or of his researches, without taking time for 
their added accumulations, for their farther 
digesting, or for the fuller finish of their ar- 
ranging, can never give a masterpiece of 
thought or of study to the world. 

It requires character to hold back as a 
means of progress ; to restrain one's impulses 
to speak, or to write, or to act hastily in an 
emergency. And character is developed by 
its exercise in personal constraint. It is often 



126 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

a great deal easier to speak out than to re- 
frain from speaking, to write at once than to 
delay writing, to press forward than to re- 
main inactive; and then it is that the true 
man's character is tested, and that it triumphs 
in the testing. 



XV. 

THE DUTY OF REFUSING TO DO 
GOOD. 



No man can do all the good there is to be 

done in this world. No warm-hearted, earnest 

lover of God and of his fellows can do all the 

good he would like to do in this world. No 

well-known, active, and efficient worker for 

God and for his fellows can do all the good 

he is asked to do in this world. Hence it is 

obvious that the most active and efficient and 

warm-hearted and earnest worker for God and 

for his fellows in this world, must choose 

among the good things which need doing, 

and which he is asked to do, and which he 

would like to do, deciding for himself what 

to do and what to leave undone; and it is 

equally clear that in deciding what good it is 

his duty to do, a man practically decides what 

good it is his duty to refuse to do, even 

127 



128 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

though he be urgently pressed to do it Thus 
it is that the duty of refusing to do good 
comes into prominence as one of the positive 
duties in the life of every man who is doing 
his best in this world, and who would be glad 
to do more — if he had any right to do it. 

In a village where there is but a single fire- 
engine, two calls for help in different direc- 
tions may come at the same time. One of 
them comes from a house standing all by 
itself on the edge of the village; a house 
which, however, is all in all as a shelter and 
a possession to its occupants. The other is 
from a crowded factory building in the very 
heart of the village. The foreman of the one 
fire company may be compelled by his sense 
of duty to hasten with the only engine avail- 
able to the village center, in view of the greater 
interests, public and private, there involved; 
and in so doing, he must of necessity refuse 
every piteous entreaty to do the good which 
it would seem he might do by going in the 
other direction. If the house on the village 
border is burned down, and its inmates are 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 29 

left desolate, it is by no fault of the fire-com- 
pany foreman, who refused to do the good 
which he had no right to do at the cost of 
neglecting plain duty elsewhere. 

Similarly in the case of a coast-guard com- 
mander, with a single life-boat available, on 
the ocean shore, when two vessels in peril 
signal him for help; it maybe his duty to 
refuse the summons of the one vessel while 
responding to the summons of the other, 
whatever are the consequences. So, again, 
it may be when a wife and mother's presence 
are needed by the bedside of her sick and 
dying husband, while a sick child calls for her 
loving ministry in another part of the house. 
She must choose between the two spheres of 
apparent good; and in deciding in favor of 
the one, she must decide against the other. 
These are extreme cases, it is true; but they 
illustrate the principle which is likewise opera- 
tive where the duty of the hour is less obvi- 
ous than here. 

A city surgeon who by his professional 
skill has, as it were, the power of life and 
9 



130 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

death in behalf of his patients, may, while 
engaged in a critical operation, be urgently 
entreated to hasten elsewhere to the relief of 
a wounded man who needs immediate surgi- 
cal assistance. The new summons is to a 
service which in itself is good; but, if he can- 
not turn from the operation before him with- 
out imperiling the life of its subject, that sur- 
geon must refuse to do the good to which 
that summons invites him. Nor is that sur- 
geon to blame if the death of the wounded 
man is a result of this refusal to attend him. 

Every public man in the community is 
asked to give the countenance of his presence 
to more good undertakings than he could 
possibly participate in, without the neglect of 
his plain duty in the sphere to which his very 
honor is already pledged. He has to learn 
when and how to refuse to do much of the 
good he is asked to do. Every pastor and 
preacher is invited, and is expected, to do 
good in more directions than are really open 
to him, in the possibilities of time and strength 
and clear demands of personal duty as pastor 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 131 

and preacher. Unless he learns to refuse 
resolutely to do much of the good which 
others think he might do, he will fail to do 
all of the good which he ought to do; as, in- 
deed, many a pastor and preacher has thus 
failed, through trying to do the good outside 
of his proper sphere which he ought to have 
refused to attempt to do. 

Every philanthropic business man, every 
large-hearted capitalist, every well-disposed 
and sensible citizen, is asked, day by day, to 
have a share in well-doing to an extent that 
would cripple him for efficient service in any 
one sphere of right endeavor, if he attempted 
a favorable response to even all of these ap- 
peals which he recognizes as in the direction 
of unmistakable good. He must decide what 
good to do, and what good to refuse to do, 
or he will do no good as he ought to do it. 
No man anywhere can begin his daily task 
in the morning, nor close his daily task in 
the evening, without practically refusing to 
give help in a hundred directions to those 
who are sick, who are sorrowing, who are 



132 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

starving, who are oppressed, or who in some 
way are in bitter need at points where he 
could give them help if it were not his duty 
to do something else just then instead of 
doing good in that way. In fact, all the good 
that is done in this world is done at the cost 
of the doers' refusal to do some other good in- 
stead of that good. And so it ever must be. 

The real question for every man to con- 
sider is not What good can I do ? but What 
good ought I to do ? The surgeon could pre- 
maturely leave the patient on whom he was 
operating, in response to a summons else- 
where; but he ought not to do so. So in the 
case of the foreman of the fire company, of 
the coast-guard commander, of the wife and 
mother watching and nursing, — what could 
be done is a possibility in two directions; 
what ought to be done is a possibility in only 
one direction. A capitalist could give all his 
money away at once to relieve the sufferers 
by an earthquake, or a pestilence, or a flood, 
or a conflagration; but that is no proof that 
he ought to do this. A pastor, or a business 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 33 

man, could turn aside from the special inter- 
ests committed to his charge, and spend all 
his time and strength in ministering to per- 
sonal sufferers in other spheres than that 
which he has promised to fill; but it may be 
his duty not to do this, in spite of the possi- 
bility of its doing. The good which a man 
ought to do, he ought to do; and the good 
which a man ought not to do, he ought not 
to do — even if he can do it. 

It shows no lack of warmth of heart, or of 
tender and generous sympathies, for a man 
to refuse to do the good which he could do, 
but which he ought not to do. It simply 
exhibits that trustful fidelity to duty which 
prompts a true soldier to obey the commands 
of his commander, regardless of any personal 
impulses or promptings of his own; moving 
forward steadily under fire in the face of every 
obstacle, when ordered to advance; and re- 
maining inactive while the battle rages before 
and on either hand, when ordered to wait in 
reserve. 

There was never a human heart so warm, 



134 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

so tender, so loving, so generous, as the heart 
of Jesus Christ; yet Jesus Christ waited here 
on earth for thirty long years without lifting 
a hand in the line of the work which was wait- 
ing for him on every side, and which, to all 
appearance, he could have entered on. Even 
when he had begun that work, and all men 
sought for his healing power, Jesus could turn 
aside into a desert place to rest awhile, or he 
could go by himself into a mountain to pray, 
or he could lie down to sleep while there was 
suffering unrelieved within the possibility of 
his reach. He knew just what good he ought 
to do, and he did it all. He knew just what 
good he ought to leave unattempted, and he 
refused to attempt any portion of that 

When, again, he sent out his disciples on 
a special mission, Jesus enjoined them to 
refuse to do any good outside of that mis- 
sion, even to the extent of stopping for a per- 
sonal salutation — which means so much in 
the Oriental world. Similarly, in the present 
day, the disciple of Jesus ought not to be 
weary in the well-doing that he ought to 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 35 

attempt, nor make haste to the attempting of 
good which it is not for him to be doing. 

All along the Bible story the fact stands 
out that men of God were willing to refuse 
to do much of the good which seemed to 
press upon them for its doing, simply because 
God had, just then, something else for them 
to do, even though that doing, in their case, 
was — doing nothing. Moses could quietly 
tend sheep in Arabia, year after year, when 
work in the line of his life-mission appeared 
to call for his active labors in Egypt. Elijah 
and John the Baptist deliberately did nothing 
in the line of their work of reform until the 
time was ripe for its doing. And Saul of 
Tarsus could spend three years in Arabia 
when souls were famishing for lack of the 
bread of life which he was commissioned to 
bring to them — in God's good time. God had 
a quieter work for these servants of his than 
that to which mere human reason would have 
assigned them ; but God knew what he 
wanted of them, and they did, or refused to 
do, accordingly. 



136 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

If, indeed, it were not for the privilege of 
resting on the conviction that God is over all, 
and that every child of God has his own good 
work to do in this world, and all other good 
work to refuse to do, life would be a hopeless 
struggle, and death would be despair. But as 
it is, every child of God can be sure that he 
has the time and the strength and the ability 
to do all the good that it is really for him to 
do, in the plan of God; and that he is called 
to have the courage and the firmness and the 
faith to refuse to do any good that, in the 
plan of God, it is not for him to undertake. 
Nor will God's cause suffer, nor will men's 
truest welfare lack, through any failure or 
refusal of a child of God to do the good 
which he could do, but which, circumstanced 
as he is, he ought not to do. 

God's plans never pivot on any man's work 
outside of that man's sphere of positive perso- 
nal duty. Nor are any of God's plans limited 
for their finishing to any one man's fullest 
activities. Even when a true man's part in the 
world's work is finished, the work at which that 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 37 

man toiled is not finished. It is given to no man 
to do all that he would like to do, nor to finish 
all that he attempts to do. Yet no work of 
God shall fail, nor be ultimately incomplete. 
The good which one man ought to refuse to 
do, another man ought to undertake; and the 
good which one man has rightly begun, an- 
other man shall rightly carry forward. " Here- 
in is the saying true, One soweth and another 
reapeth;" and so God's work goes on. This 
is the thought which comforted the poet E. R. 
Sill, when he wrote for us all : 

" Fret not that thy day is gone, 
And the task is still undone. 
'Twas not thine, it seems, at all : 
Near to thee it chanced to fall, 
Close enough to stir thy brain, 
And to vex thy heart in vain. 

"Somewhere in a nook forlorn, 
Yesterday a babe was born : 
He shall do thy waiting task ; 
All thy questions he shall ask, 
And the answers will be given, 
Whispered lightly out of heaven. 



138 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

" His shall be no stumbling feet, 
Falling when they should be fleet; 
He shall hold no broken clew ; 
Friends shall unto him be true ; 
Men shall love him ; falsehood's aim 
Shall not shatter his good name. 

" Day shall nerve his arm with light, 
Slumber soothe him all the night ; 
Summer's peace and winter's storm 
Help him all his will perform. 
'Tis enough of joy for thee 
His high service to foresee. " 

And " here is the patience and the faith of 
the saints." In doing all the good that one 
has a right to do, one must trustfully refuse 
to do the good which it belongs to some one 
else to do. 



XVI. 

THE DUTY OF STRIVING TO REN- 
DER ONE'S SELF USELESS. 



There is a world of satisfaction in feeling 
that one is useful ; that one is of important 
service in his sphere; that one is doing that 
which needs to be done, and which he alone, 
or which he pre-eminently, is fitted to do. 
It is a dreary state for one to be in, when he 
feels that he is useless; that he can do no 
service in any sphere; that he has no imme- 
diate mission of good to any human being. 
Most trying of all is it, for one who has been 
useful, who has been of real service in the 
world, to find himself no longer needed, no 
longer a necessity to those about him ; forced 
to cry with Milton's Samson: 

"Now blind, disheartened, shamed, dishonored, 
quelled, 
To what can I be useful ?" 

139 



140 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Yet, as a practical matter, there are few 
spheres, if any, in human life, where it is not 
one's duty to strive faithfully and in tireless- 
ness to render one's self useless; where, in- 
deed, one's immediate usefulness is not to 
be measured by his capacity for rendering 
himself useless. Does that statement seem 
questionable? If it does, just look at the 
facts in the case. 

If there is a sudden leak in your house- 
roof during a driving storm, and the rain is 
endangering your ceilings and carpets in the 
rooms nearest the roof, you will, perhaps, 
send word to a carpenter, or tinner, or 
roofer; asking his help in the emergency. 
When he comes, there are two ways possible 
to him. He can go out on the roof with an 
assistant, and cover the leak with an oil-cloth 
or a sheet of tin, which he and his helper 
hold in place there. That will make him a 
"useful" man as long as the storm lasts — 
which may be several days and nights ; and 
he could make himself useful again in that 
same way at every recurrence of a storm. 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 141 

On the other hand, that roofer can, with or 
without an assistant, repair that roof in an 
hour's time, so that it is as sound as ever, 
and his services are no longer needed there. 
That makes the roof useful, and the roofer 
useless. The latter has done his duty, by 
striving to render himself useless ; and he has 
proved more useful than if he had striven to 
be " useful " unceasingly. And as it is in this 
minor matter, so it is all the way up in the 
scale of right endeavor. 

Prolonging a piece of work for another 
is a method of proving the worker's indis- 
pensable usefulness to his employer. Fin- 
ishing up a piece of work to which one is set, 
renders the worker immediately useless in 
that sphere. Yet who can doubt that the 
effort to render one's self useless in this way 
is more commendable than the effort to prove 
one's usefulness in the other way? 

A quaint old New-Englander said, that he 
could tell by the sound of the carpenters' 
hammers, as he was passing a new house in 
process of building, whether the men were at 



142 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

work "by the day" or "by the job; " whether 
they were paid a stated price for each day's 
work, or were paid a given amount for the 
entire undertaking. In the one case, he said, 
the hammer strokes came leisurely, and with 
convenient spaces between them, as if they 
would say: "By — the — day, — By — the — 
day, — By — the — day." In the other case 
they came thick and fast: "Bythejob. By- 
thejob. Bythejob." In one case the car- 
penters were determined to prove themselves 
useful — one day at a time. In the other case, 
they were striving to prove themselves use- 
less there — by finishing that piece of work, 
in order to take hold of another piece of 
work elsewhere. 

There are ever two ways of striving to fill 
one's place in the world : one is, by seeking 
to prove one's self useful ; the other, by striv- 
ing to render one's self useless. The first 
way is the commoner and the more attrac- 
tive; the second is the rarer and the more 
noble. Whatever might seem to be the com- 
parative effect of these two methods on the 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 43 

personal interests of the individual worker, 
there can hardly be a question that the latter 
method is the better one for the work under- 
taken, and for the involved interests of those 
for whom the work is attempted. Whatever 
self-interest might seem to prompt, duty 
clearly calls to the latter course. 

Take, for another example, the mission of 
one's family physician. His usefulness is 
shown in the time of sickness. So far as that 
family is concerned, he is useless when the 
health of each member of the household is 
such that there is no need of his services 
there. But when he is called in attendance 
at that family, his plain duty is to strive to 
render himself useless as quickly as possi- 
ble. If he would prolong his apparent use- 
fulness, and increase his fees accordingly, he 
might seek to keep his patient in a state of 
ill-health ; but acting under a sense of duty, 
and out of regard to the welfare of his pa- 
tient, he strives to hasten his patient's recov- 
ery, even though he thereby renders himself 
useless. It is said that the Chinese, in their 



144 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

treatment of physicians, recognize the natu- 
ral unwillingness of human nature to render 
itself useless, when usefulness settles the 
measure of reward. The emperor pays a 
regular salary to his physicians as long as 
he is well; but as soon as he is sick their 
pay ceases, and it is not resumed again until 
he is fully restored to health. Under these 
conditions the Chinese court-physicians are 
likely to strive to render themselves useless ; 
for they receive no pay unless they are use- 
less. Our Christian physicians need no such 
treatment as this to induce them to strive to 
render themselves useless in every family 
which they attend; but the illustration is a 
good one as indicating our common duty of 
striving in this direction. 

It is peculiarly the mission of a teacher to 
strive to render himself useless, as a teacher, 
to the scholars of his charge. When first 
he takes them in hand, they have need of 
him at every step. His ability in the line of 
his mission is, however, practically to be 
measured by his success in rendering him- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 145 

self useless. A poor teacher wants to re- 
main useful to his scholars, or acts as if he 
wanted to. He continues to help his scholars 
all the way along in their work ; or he con- 
tinues to do his scholars' work for them, in- 
stead of showing the scholars how to do 
their own work. A good teacher, on the 
contrary, strives to put his scholars beyond 
the need of a teacher's help, so that the 
teacher will be as useless to the scholars 
as are the swaddling-clothes of a babe to a 
full-grown youth. 

The Apostle Paul uses this figure of a 
truly successful teacher, when he suggests 
that the symbolic ritual law of Moses is use- 
less to the , Christian disciple, even though 
it once had great usefulness. "The law was 
our schoolmaster [or tutor, or pedagogue] to 
bring us unto Christ, [very useful up to that 
point,] that we might be justified by faith. 
But after that faith is come, we are no longer 
under a schoolmaster. [The law is now 
useless, through the fulfilling of its pur- 
pose.] " So of every other schoolmaster. 
10 



146 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

He is a success only through coming to be 
useless. 

Parents have a special duty, and parents 
have a special temptation, at this very point. 
Parents are very useful to their young chil- 
dren. Parents enjoy being thus useful. But. 
it is the duty of parents to strive to render 
themselves useless, in one thing after another, 
as parents ; and, in spite of their enjoyment 
of being useful to their children, it is their 
duty to strive to render themselves useless, " 
as parents, in all things. They ought to be- 
come useless, in carrying their children, in 
dressing their children, in cutting up their 
children's food, in putting words of speech 
or of prayer into their children's mouths; 
and so on, step by step, toward the manhood 
and the womanhood of their children. It is 
a perverted sentiment, it is a failure in duty, 
which prompts parents to prolong their im- 
mediate usefulness to their children, by keep- 
ing those children dependent on them beyond 
the proper period of filial dependency. It 
is a sad sight to see a son, of the years of 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 47 

manhood, and in full vigor of life, still a 
child in his dependence on his father's care; 
or to see a daughter in full health, and of 
woman's age, still a child in dependence on 
her mother's ministry. It is to the parent's 
shame, when a parent of a proper child can 
say, "My child, although at the years of ma- 
turity, is as truly dependent on me for paren- 
tal care and counsel as ever." Such a parent 
is so far a failure, as a parent. 

The father who is a success as a father will 
have rendered himself useless as a father to 
his son, — in matters of control and direction, 
although not in matters of sympathy and 
affection — by the time that that son has 
reached the years of full manhood; and so 
it will be with the successful mother and her 
daughter. A son or a daughter wisely trained 
to maturity, ought to be capable, not only of 
acting independently of his or her parents in 
matters of conscience and judgment, but of 
giving suggestions and help to those parents 
from the new stand-point of a later genera- 
tion than that of the parents. And children 



148 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

thus trained are all the more tender and lov- 
ing and grateful toward their parents, because 
those parents have done their duty in being 
most useful by striving successfully to ren- 
der themselves useless in the purely paren- 
tal sphere. 

A man who founds a new business, or who 
is at the head of an extensive mercantile es- 
tablishment, of a large manufacturing con- 
cern, of a banking-house, of an insurance 
company, or of any other important under- 
taking, has before him a choice of two ways. 
He can retain as much of the business as is 
possible in his own hands, thereby rendering 
himself not only useful, but indispensable, in 
the entire conduct and management of the 
enterprise; or, on the other hand, he can set 
himself to the arranging of the business in 
systematized departments, and to the training 
of men for the oversight and charge of each 
of these departments — including personal as- 
sistants and skilled co-directors — so that his 
immediate personal activities become less and 
less essential to the progress of the under- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 49 

taking; until, in a sense, he seems no longer 
a necessity there. In the one case, the man 
makes himself so useful that his death would 
prove disastrous to the business as a whole. 
In the other case, he has so skilfully striven 
to render himself useless, as a controlling 
and indispensable head, that his death would 
prove no more of a blow to the enterprise 
than the death of any other one man of prom- 
inence in its directing. In the one case, his 
work lives after him; in the other, it dies 
with him. Who can doubt which of these 
methods is the superior one? 

Success and failure are similarly shown, in 
the pursuance of the one or the other of 
these two methods, in editorial work, in the 
pastorate, in the superintendence of a Sunday- 
school, and in wellnigh every other sphere 
of intellectual or moral activity. A man has 
a right to stamp his personality on his work 
in any one of these spheres; but his en- 
deavor should be so to impress that per- 
sonality on the very organization which he 
oversees and directs, that his personal pres- 



ISO PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

ence and activities in that organization shall 
no longer be necessary to the manifestation 
of his personality in its every department. 

This phase of duty is not wholly a pleas- 
ant one to contemplate; but it is none the 
less a phase of real duty for all that. It is 
so delightful to realize that we are useful, 
that we are needful, that we are indispensa- 
ble, in our spheres of labor. It is so hard to 
recognize the fact that we no longer are a 
necessity to others, that our once so impor- 
tant activities can now be dispensed with, that 
we have become useless where formerly we 
alone could fill the place and do its work. 
But in spite of its trials, the duty of striving 
to this very end is imperative. The parent 
ought to become useless to his children as a 
parent, the teacher to his scholars, the phy- 
sician to his patient, the pastor to his people, 
the founder of a business to the conduct of 
that business, the editor to his paper's exist- 
ence, the ship's captain to the voyage of his 
passengers. And he is most useful, he best 
does his work, who strives most successfully 



PR A CTICAL PARADOXES. 1 5 1 

to render himself useless — by the completion 
of his work. 

It is to be borne in mind that the duty here 
urged is that of rendering one's self useless 
by the finishing of one's work; not that of 
proving one's self useless in the doing, or in 
the shirking, of one's work. There was a 
time when the Apostle Paul felt that he was 
so useful to the early Church that he must 
not cease his labors, however toilsome and 
trying they might be to him. "I am in a 
strait betwixt the two," he said, " having the 
desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is 
very far better : yet to abide in the flesh is 
more needful for your sake. And having 
this confidence, I know that I shall abide." 
But Paul strove to finish his work so that he 
should no longer be needful to others; and 
there came a time when he could say trust- 
fully: "The time of my departure is come. 
... I have finished the course." And he 
was then ready to count himself useless here, 
because his work here was accomplished. 

Ay, and there was a time when our blessed 



152 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Lord himself could count his labors no longer 
needed here, when he could look upon him- 
self, as at last useless, in the flesh, to his loved 
disciples on earth. They deemed his pres- 
ence with them as useful beyond all meas- 
ure, and their hearts were filled with sorrow 
at the thought of his going away from them. 
" Nevertheless I tell you the truth," he said 
to them ; " It is expedient for you that I go 
away." And to his Father he said, of the 
reason for his going away : " I have finished 
the work which thou gavest me to do." And 
when he could say of his earthly mission, 
"It is finished," he "bowed his head, and 
gave up his spirit." In this light of duty, 
it is a blessed thing to become useless through 
having been useful until usefulness is no 
longer a necessity in one's sphere. 



i ■ 



XVII. 

THE INEXCUSABLENESS OF 
EXCUSES, 



There is positively no excuse for making 
excuses — excuses for doing wrong or for 
failing to do right. A defense of one's course 
as absolutely correct is one thing. A con- 
fession of one's course as absolutely inde- 
fensible is another thing. Either of these 
methods is well in its place. But an excuse 
for one's course as wrong, but not blame- 
worthy, is never wise, never expedient, never 
commendable. Yet it is one of the rarest 
things in the world for a person frankly to 
confess to error, or squarely to refuse to do a 
plain duty, without proffering an excuse. In 
bringing himself to trial, a man's verdict is 
likely to be either " Guilty, but served him 
right/' or "Not guilty, but mustn't do so 



i S3 



154 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Excusing another's faults or failures is a 
very different matter from seeking an excuse 
for one's own. True charity prompts us to 
look for a probable or possible excuse for 
others. True self-respect prompts us to ad- 
mit unequivocally that there is no excuse for 
our not conforming to the highest standard 
attainable. " The real man is one who always 
finds excuses for others, but never excuses 
himself." There is, in fact, hardly any truer 
test of high manhood or of high woman- 
hood than the uniform refraining from mak- 
ing excuses. Yet there are multitudes of 
intelligent and well-disposed persons who 
think that the framing of an excuse when 
they are delinquent or reluctant is a ne- 
cessity ; that somehow it puts them in a 
better light than if they said unhesitatingly, 
"I am at fault," or, "I am not willing to 
do right." 

"And they all with one consent began to 
make excuse," says Jesus concerning the per- 
sons of whom he told in a parable. The 
practice so common in that day is a practice 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 155 

of all ages. " He that does amiss never lacks 
excuses/' and "Any excuse will serve when 
one has not a mind to do a thing," are Italian 
proverbs. " He is a bad shot who cannot find 
an excuse/' say the Germans. "A bad work- 
man always complains of his tools/' is the 
English putting of it. An Oriental story is 
told of a man going to his neighbor to bor- 
row a rope, and receiving the answer that it 
was needed that day to tie up a heap of sand. 
" To tie up sand ! " said the would-be borrower ; 
" I don't see how you can tie sand with a 
rope." "Ah!" said the other, "you can do 
almost anything with a rope when you don't 
want to lend it." 

The habit of making excuses is pretty sure 
to lead one to some such folly in their framing 
as is illustrated by this story of the Orientals. 
Inasmuch as no excuse for wrong-doing can 
ever justify the wrong, and no excuse for fail- 
ing to perform a positive duty can ever justify 
that failure, every excuse will inevitably fall 
below its aim, and so bring its framer into 
ridicule or contempt, whether the excuse be 



156 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

true or, as is often the case, be an ingenious 
and perhaps unconscious lie. 

Many years ago, before the days of steam- 
boats and railroads, the common mode of 
communication between a small seaport in 
Connecticut and New York City was a packet- 
sloop, which made trips to and fro across the 
sound as often as favoring winds would allow. 
The captain of that vessel was the express 
messenger by whom the villagers did most 
of their city shopping. On one occasion a 
merchant of the village handed the captain a 
doubtful-looking five-dollar note on the old 
Merchants' Bank, with a request that on his 
next trip he would go to the bank and learn 
if the note was a good one. If it was genuine, 
he was to obtain a fresh one in its exchange. 
If it was a counterfeit, it would be so marked 
by the bank. 

The captain promised to attend to the com- 
mission, but thought nothing more of the 
matter until he had returned to the village 
from New York, and was asked by the mer- 
chant as to the result of his inquiry. As he 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 57 

was an inveterate excuse-maker, he was, of 
course, not ready to admit that he had for- 
gotten a commission. Taking out his wallet, 
therefore, he handed back the identical note 
to its owner. " But how is this ? " asked the 
merchant; "I asked you to get a fresh note 
if this were genuine, and have it stamped as 
counterfeit if it were not." " I know all that," 
said the plausible captain. "I told the bank 
man just what you said; but he wasn't ready 
to do either thing. He eyed that bill on both 
sides, and then he said to me, says he, ' Cap- 
tain, that bill is a sort of half and half. It 
ain't good enough to give a new one for, but 
it's too good to cross. It's a middling good 
bill — neither one thing nor t'other. You'd 
better take that back again.' So there it is 
for you." 

From that day to this there is a saying in 
that village that a thing which is of doubtful 
value is "like Captain Daniel's bill, neither 
one thing nor the other." And that old cap- 
tain's excuse was about as good as the aver- 
age excuse which is proffered for a failure in 



158 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

well-doing at home, in school, in the office, 
the store, the mill, or on the farm. Ingenuity 
in excuse-making is not good sense in excuse- 
making. No practice in the business can save 
one from making a fool of himself in that 
business. 

A justifying reason for inability to do what 
would otherwise have been done, is a very dif- 
ferent thing from an excuse for not doing what 
was not impossible. It is excuses, — offered in 
palliation or extenuation of a fault or a fail- 
ure, — not justifying reasons for action or non- 
action, that are inexcusable. Ladies rarely 
give a reason for postponing social calls on their 
acquaintances; but they abound in excuses. 
Absence from town or prolonged sickness 
would be a reason for not making a call. The 
pressure of varied duties is an uncomplimen- 
tary excuse for neglecting an acquaintance or 
a friend. 

If a man had promised his wife, as he left 
his house in the morning, to call and make a 
purchase for her at a certain store, during the 
day, and now he is back at his home without 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 159 

bringing what she had asked for, the ques- 
tion comes properly, Is there any reason for 
his failure? but not, Is there any plausible 
excuse? If he can say, "I found that that 
store was burned down last night ;" or, "I 
called at the store, but could not find what 
you asked for," he has given a sufficient rea- 
son for his failure to bring what was wanted. 
But if he simply forgot the commission, or 
kept putting it off until it was too late to at- 
tend to it, there is no better way for him than 
to own up frankly to that fact, and ask for- 
giveness accordingly. 

Any excuse that such a man may proffer 
to his wife about the pressure of his business 
cares, or the attractiveness of a conversation 
he was in as he passed the store, only makes 
the matter worse. It shows that his wife's 
wishes and his own word had a minor place 
in his thoughts, and that he deems it not 
strange that this should have been the case. 
So it is, all the way through, with this busi- 
ness of excuse-making. The fault or the fail- 
ure is bad enough. There is no use in making 



160 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

it worse by showing how little reason there is 
for its existence. 

"And, oftentimes, excusing of a fault 
Doth make the fault the worse by the excuse." 

Between husband and wife, or friend and 
friend, or teacher and pupil, or principal and 
agent, there is no call for any suspicion of in- 
tentional wrong-doing or neglect. It is taken 
for granted by each that the other intended 
well, meant to be faithful, wanted to do right. 
Why, then, is there a call for an excuse to 
prove what is already understood? A frank 
and unqualified admission of blame throws 
the one at fault on the magnanimity, or gen- 
erosity, or charity, or considerateness, or affec- 
tion, of the other. It is impossible for one to 
be in better shape than just there. But the 
moment an excuse is proffered, a new issue 
is raised. The question then is, whether that 
excuse ought to be accepted as a palliation 
of the offense, or whether it is an aggravation 
of it. The original question, whether the one 
at fault was to be heartily forgiven, is neces- 
sarily lost sight of. 



- 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. l6l 

Those who really love us, or who really 
trust us, will ordinarily find a great deal bet- 
ter excuses for our shortcomings or trans- 
gressions than we can frame for ourselves, if 
we will confidently leave our case in their 
hands. No trouble would come from our 
misdoing or our lack, if only we would refrain 
from the inexcusable attempting of excuses. 

If it is inexcusable to make excuses to our 
fellow-men, how inexcusable it is to attempt to 
deceive the Lord, or to better ourselves in his 
sight, by the proffer of excuses for our mis- 
doing or our omissions in duty. It only 
makes the matter worse for us to say, that 
we are unready to do our duty toward God 
because some one else is hypocritical in his 
claim of well-doing, or that we are kept back 
from the open service of God by our dislike 
of the creeds of this or that church or denomi- 
nation. 

If, indeed, we think that we have done the 

best we could do, and that we are now ready 

to do better should the way be opened and 

the light be given, let us appeal confidently to 
ii 



1 62 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

God's knowledge of this fact. But if we see 
that we have not come up to God's require- 
ments of us, our hope is not in excuses, but 
in confession. " If we say that we have no 
sin, we deceive ourselves [but we do not de- 
ceive God], and the truth is not in»us. If we 
confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous 
to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from 
all unrighteousness." 



XVIII. 
CHANGING THE PAST. 



There is no sadder truth to the human 
mind than the irrevocableness of the past. 
The future can by God's blessing be influ- 
enced; but the past is fixed forever. That 
is the feeling of even those who believe that 
"with God all things are possible," — all things 
for the future, that is; for how can God him- 
self change that which is no longer before 
us, or before him, to be changed ? This truth 
it is which makes the past so gloomy in the 
minds of those who realize how much better 
it might have been, or who dwell upon the 
brightness and the hope that it carried away 
with it, or that it destroyed utterly. 

Good Hezekiah gave expression to the 

wellnigh universal feeling on this subject, 

when he chose the sign which should assure 

him that God would answer his prayer for a 

163 



1 64 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

longer life. "Shall the shadow go forward 
ten steps, or go back ten steps?" asked the 
prophet, of the king. And Hezekiah an- 
swered, "It is a light thing for the shadow 
to decline ten steps : nay, but let the shadow 
return backward ten steps." 

All of us would agree with Hezekiah on this 
point. All of us can see that the future is as 
open and uncertain as the past is closed and 
sure. Anything may happen in the future. 
There are no surprises which may not be in 
store for us. Life or death, suffering or joy, 
disappointment or prosperity unprecedented, 
overflowing love or utter loneliness, — we 
know that to-morrow may bring these to us 
beyond our strongest fears or our brightest 
hopes. "It is a light thing" for any change 
to come to us in the future. Not so, how- 
ever, with the past. What has been is, and 
ever must be. No hope of change is there. 

" Not heaven itself upon the past has power; 
But what has been, has been, and I have had 
my hour." 

There are both natural and moral impossi- 



. i 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 65 

bilities in the realm of God's doings. That 
which cannot be, even God is unable to make. 
That is our way of looking at it. But what 
is the record in the case of Hezekiah? 

"And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the 
Lord: and he [the Lord] brought the shadow 
ten steps backward, by which it had gone 
down on the dial of Ahaz." So God did 
change the past, did turn back the dial of 
time, did enable his servant to live a portion 
of his life over again. And what God has 
done once, God can do again. There is a 
sense in which God changes the past to every 
child of his who asks such a change in need 
and in faith. God's prophecies and promises 
to his people of old are to his people of to- 
day. " Hear this, ye old men," he says, " and 
give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land. Hath 
this been in your days, or in the days of your 
fathers? Tell ye your children of it, and let 
your children tell their children, and their 
children another generation. That which the 
palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; 
and that which the locust hath left hath 



1 66 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

the cankerworm eaten; and that which the 
cankerworm hath left hath the caterpiller 
eaten." 

Most of us think that a touch of that 
prophecy has been felt in our experience at 
one time or another in the bitterly remem- 
bered past But how about the promise 
which follows it? "Be glad then, ye chil- 
dren of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your 
God : for he hath given you the former rain 
in just measure, and he causeth to come down 
for you the rain, the former rain and the lat- 
ter rain, in the first month. And the floors 
shall be full of wheat, and the fats shall over- 
flow with wine and oil. And / will restore to 
you the years that the locust hath eaten, the 
cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the 
palmerworm, my great army which I sent 
among you. And ye shall eat in plenty and 
be satisfied, and shall praise the name of the 
Lord your God, that hath dealt wondrously 
with you: and my people shall never be 
ashamed. 

What a promise that to the sad-hearted 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 67 

child of God who counts the past of his sor- 
row and trial irrevocable ! And that promise 
is God's promise. It is the promise of one 
who never promised what he cannot perform, 
who never promised what he is not ready to 
make good. The sun can go back on the 
dial. The past can be changed. 

How much to us is involved in this thought ! 
How large a share of our anxiety, of our re- 
grets, and of our longings, rests on the past! 
If only the past could come back to us ! If 
only we could live our child-life over again! 
If only we could once more have those joys 
of our maturer years, in that home which 
was, but no longer is! If only we could 
share again the inspiration and the sympathy 
of that companionship which ended in the 
long-gone years ! 

" But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me." 

And oh for the power to change the words 
and the deeds of the long ago ! If only we 
could undo that one hour's sad doing! If 
only we could unsay that one bitter or that 



1 68 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

one thoughtless and foolish word ! If only in 
the light of the present we could have now 
the privilege of that choice which we treated 
so lightly as it came and went — once for all ! 
But no ; it is too late for this. And what a 
gloom is on our present and our future at 
their best, in consequence. 

" The past rolls forward on the sun 
And makes all night. O dreams begun, 
Not to be ended ! Ended bliss ! 
And life, that will not end in this ! 
My days go on ; my days go on." 

It is while we are thus gloomy or despondent 
over the past with its losses and its mistakes, 
and while we sit shivering in the chill of its 
shadow, and in the dread of its further con- 
sequences, that the word of our God comes 
to us reprovingly and assuringly, " Remem- 
ber ye not the former things, neither con- 
sider the things of old. Behold, I will do a 
new thing; now shall it spring forth; shall 
ye not know it? I will even make a way in 
the wilderness, and rivers in the desert." The 
past and the future are alike in the hands of 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 69 

God: and to God all things are possible." 
Even that which has been is no longer be- 
yond his control. He can change the past 
as truly as he can shape the future. 

But, how can God change the past? How 
can that which already is, be as if it never 
had been ? These questions are not so easy 
of answer. As with many another truth, w r e 
are here called of God to accept his promise 
as sure, without seeing just how he can make 
it good. Indeed, most of the promises of 
God are paradoxical; but that makes their 
fulfillment none the less real and precious to 
us. And concerning the past, in our own 
experiences, or in the experiences of others, 
have we never known it changed through 
new light, or through the operation of new 
influences? Has it never been found that 
that which caused our hearts to sink, as a 
great disaster, was a source of subsequent 
comfort to us? that that which was called 
failure became a triumph ? that an apparent 
loss was an actual gain? that a bitter dis- 
appointment was finally rejoiced over? 



170 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

There have been times of misunderstand- 
ing with dear ones, when our hearts cried 
out," Now, surely, all hope is gone. Nothing 
can change this. Love, faith, friendship — all 
are in the past." Yet a few words of explana- 
tion, or a few days or weeks of patient wait- 
ing, and the dark cloud was first gilded and 
then floated away in light, and the sky was 
clear from horizon to zenith, behind, before, 
and on either hand. The past was changed. 
Its dread realities were no longer real. All 
of us have had experiences like this. We 
cannot have forgotten them. And shall not 
that which has happened to us once and 
again be possible to us in the future? 

This, however, you say, is not an actual 
change of the past, but only a change of our 
estimate of it, or of our relations to its expe- 
riences. Well, call it what you will, it is that 
which makes God's promise good to us, and 
that makes our joy complete. The past 
which now seems gloomy may glow with 
radiance. The loss which now seems irrepa- 
rable may prove a gain unspeakable. The 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 171 

mistakes and the follies and the disappoint- 
ments of the years which are gone may be 
seen, in the light of God's grace, to be of the 
"all things" which "work together for good" 
"to them that love God." If the change in 
our past is to be wrought of God through a 
change in ourselves, let us have none the less 
hope of it, none the less rejoicing in it. Let 
us look up to God trustfully, and say con- 
cerning the past as well as the future or the 
present : 

" For us, — whatever's undergone 
Thou knowest ; wiliest what is done. 
Grief may be joy misunderstood, 
Only the good discerns the good." 

The child of God has no right to worry or 
to grieve over any past as irrevocable. Any 
sorrow, any loss, any folly, any shame, which 
burdens our memory, can be cast confidently 
on Him who is ready to bear our every bur- 
den, and who, as he takes it from us, says 
cheeringly: " Behold, I make all things new." 
The hope which is buried from our human 



172 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

eyes is not hidden from God's sight. To 
him it is never a lost hope — or a forgotten 
one. 

" And in the hereafter, angels may- 
Roll the stone from its grave away." 



XIX. 

THE SAFETY OF DANGER. 



Almost any one can see the dangerousness 
of danger, but the safety of danger is not so 
apparent. Yet there is a sense in which our 
truest safety is in our constant danger; a 
sense in which it may be said that our pro- 
tection from danger is through the very pres- 
ence of danger. And this practical paradox 
has its important bearing on our every-day 
life in the world, and on the life beyond. 

The added peril which comes through peril 
and the consciousness of peril, is illustrated 
in the fact that it is by no means so easy to 
walk a narrow ledge on the brink of a lofty 
precipice, or to cross a yawning abyss on a 
single girder, as it would be to tread surely 
within similar limits on a parlor carpet, or on 
a firm flagged - pavement. So, again, it is 
shown in the fact that when the greatest stake 

i73 



174 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

is involved in a steady hand or in a clear head, 
in some important trial of strength or skill, 
the very largeness of the danger of failure 
will often unsteady the hand or confuse the 
brain, which would otherwise be competent 
to the task of the moment without a question. 
This coarser side of the paradox is more 
readily seen, but it is not surer, than the other 
side. The added safety which comes through 
the recognized existence of danger is as real 
and as prevailing as the added danger through 
the same existence and recognition. 

It is the constant danger of explosion in a 
powder mill or magazine which secures the 
comparative safety of that focal center of ex- 
plosives. It is the special danger of fire that 
gives special immunity from burning to many 
a mill or warehouse or dwelling which is 
stored with combustibles. It is the ever-im- 
minent danger of dealing out death by a 
careless hand that makes the druggist's eye 
so watchful, and his ordinary ministerings so 
trustworthy. It is the multiplied and never 
intermitted dangers of the helpless babe that 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 175 

secures its. safety in the ceaseless oversight 
of its loving and consciously responsible 
mother. It is the fact that danger lurks in 
every passing breeze, in every article of food or 
drink, and at every unguarded footstep of 
life's journey, that prompts the added atten- 
tion to diet and dress, and to cleanliness and 
ventilation and exercise, which in itself is 
measurable safety from the danger which 
has demanded this attention. 

It is the public danger of epidemic and 
conflagration and crime and disorder, in our 
more crowded cities, that organizes the entire 
community for sanitary and police protec- 
tions, and that ensures safety to the rich and 
the poor alike; the common safety being a 
result of the common danger. It is because 
there is new danger at every new second on 
the rushing train, or on the steamer off a foggy 
coast, that causes the faithful engine-driver, 
or the trusty pilot, never to turn his look or 
thought from his duty of securing the safety 
of those committed to his charge. And so 
at every point in the realm of physical perils. 



176 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

It is in and through the very danger of the 
hour that the safety of the hour is secured. 

In the mental sphere, also, it is much the 
same as in the physical. It is the danger of 
misunderstanding what is spoken or written 
that quickens the ear and the eye of him who 
would learn, and that carries him safely past 
the perils which he fears. It is because of his 
danger of not being understood in what he 
is saying, that makes a man choose his words 
so carefully as to make him safe in the con- 
sciousness that no one can misunderstand 
him now. It is because of the danger of for- 
getting what he has read or heard, that a man 
seeks and finds safety in fixing in his memory 
that which he feels he must not let slip. It is 
because of the danger of his falling behind his 
fellows in knowledge and in intellectual power, 
and of the practical consequences to himself 
of his remaining in mental ignorance, that he 
toils and struggles in his outreaching after 
mental acquisitions, until he is safe against 
being a drone or a laggard in the field of let- 
ters. It is, in fact, the practical danger of 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 77 

leaving truth undisclosed, in the fields of 
thought, of science, and of art, that prompts 
to intellectual activity generally, and that 
thereby secures the aggregate results of study 
and research all the world over. If it were 
not for the dangers in the realm of the mind- 
powers, there would be far less of safety there. 

But it is in the moral sphere pre-eminently 
that the safety of danger is manifest, and that 
for ourselves and for others there is safety in 
proportion to the danger which is imminent. 
It is true that the simple demand of duty, and 
the innate promptings of right, ought to be 
sufficient to make every man faithful and un- 
swerving in the loving service of his God, and 
in a loving regard for the welfare and needs 
of his fellow-men ; but it is also true that this 
demand and this prompting are not sufficient 
to this end. Were it not for the danger of 
wrong-doing in this world, there would be far 
less of safety through well-doing in this world. 

Even with the most loving and tender 

heart, and in the largest and most generous 

soul, here in this world as it is, it is the dan- 
12 



178 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

ger which confronts one in wrong-doing that 
operates to secure safety from wrong-doing 
and its results. What if a child found there 
was no danger of grieving his mother, or of 
paining his playmate, or of making himself 
unhappy, by any act of selfishness or ill- 
nature, or by any word or look of unkindness 
or of discontent? Would he be safe against 
selfishness, unkindness, discontent, and ill- 
nature? Is not his safety here dependent on 
the danger which is before him ? What if a 
husband and father knew there was no danger 
of his failing to make his home a happy one, 
through his over-attention to his outside busi- 
ness, or through his inattention to thoughtful 
and self-forgetting ministries to wife and chil- 
dren in that home? Could he be as safe, in that 
sphere, as a sense of the danger which he is 
watchful to avoid now makes him ? What if 
the best of friends were never in danger of 
inconsiderate looks, or speech, or conduct, in 
their ordinary intercourse of friendship ? Could 
they have that habit of gentle, tender, win- 
some, and impressive considerateness, in their 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 1 79 

mutual bearing toward each other, which is 
now their safety in and through all dangers? 
Ah! it is the peril of failure that gives safety 
from that peril to the most loving and gra- 
cious heart. 

But it is not merely in the loving heart, it is 
also in the weak and erring human heart, that 
the safety of the hour largely rests in the 
danger of the hour. A godly and venerable 
Christian bishop has spoken, in a sermon, 
of the steadying influence on himself of the 
consciousness that he is always under the 
eyes of those who know him and observe 
him, in the community where he lives. " I 
never step out of my house in that city," he 
says, "I never pass along any street more 
public or retired, I am never anywhere, with- 
out being likely to be seen by some one who 
knows me. And a knowledge of this fact 
makes me always watchful of myself, and 
cautious. I want it to be so that whoever 
sees me, at any time or anywhere, will be 
able to see nothing in me that is inconsis- 
tent with the character of a loyal and faithful 



l8o PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

servant of Christ." Would that Christian 
bishop have this constant sense of personal 
responsibility in his representative character 
before others, if there were no danger of in- 
consistency between his conduct and his pro- 
fessions ? Is he not, in fact, all the safer because 
of being always in danger ? And is that Chris- 
tian bishop alone in this safety of moral recti- 
tude through this danger of moral deflection? 
Is it not true that we, each and all, are held 
back from wrong-doing eveiy day, if not every 
hour, of our lives, by the danger which faces 
us if we turn aside or go astray? What if 
we could follow every sinful impulse of our 
hearts without any personal danger to our- 
selves or to our loved ones? What if we 
could go just where we pleased, and do just 
what we pleased, with perfect immunity from 
evil consequences to ourselves or to others ? 
What, indeed, if we alone were to be involved 
in the results of our wrong-doing? What if 
there were no danger of our breaking the 
hearts of others, of our w r recking a happy 
home, of our dishonoring a noble name, of 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. l8l 

our bringing into disgrace the cause which 
we are most closely linked with, by our moral 
deflection? Could we be sure of the safety 
which is now ours in tremulous confidence, if 
the danger before which we tremble were less 
real or less terrible? No, it is in our danger 
that our safety lies. It is only as we think 
we may fall that we are enabled to stand. 

Nor need we be humiliated, even though 
we be humbled, in the knowledge that we 
should not be safe if it were not for our dan- 
ger. It is better for us to find safety in dan- 
ger, than for us to be without that safety 
which is possible only through danger; 

" Better to be driven 
By adverse winds upon the coast of Heaven ; 

Better to be, 
As it were, shipwrecked upon its rocks 

By fiercest shocks, 
Than to sail across a waveless sea 
Into a Christless immortality.' ' 

And both this life and the life to come will 
have largest blessing in and through the safety 
of danger in the life that now is. 



1 82 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

God knew us in our possibilities, as well as 
in our needs, when he gave equal prominence 
to the danger which confronts the human soul 
in the way of evil, and to the safety which is 
provided for that soul in the way of good. 
And not only does God supply added help to 
those who realize their danger, and who would 
find in it an impulse to safety, but he has so 
ordered the course of events as to make the 
highest attainment in character and in capacity 
to be dependent on the presence of danger, 
and on the finding of safety in and through 
that danger. Only to those who are in danger 
is safety from danger assured. Only out of 
danger is salvation itself a possibility. And 
alike the noble bearing of the soldier and 
the heavenly expression of the saint are a 
consequence of danger faced and of dan- 
ger triumphed over, and are the inspired and 
the inspiring witness to the safety of danger, 
through faith. 



XX. 

LIVING IS DYING. 

A Christian business man, who was yet 
in the prime of life, and who had seemed, 
indeed, to be the very personification of vig- 
orous and bounding health, was taken with 
annoying and distressing symptoms of dis- 
ease, which did not yield to treatment, as he 
and his skilled physician had anticipated. 
After a time his physician expressed a wish 
for consultation with eminent medical practi- 
tioners, and a council to consider the case 
was held accordingly. The result of that 
consultation was a conviction on the part of 
the physicians that their patient was already 
death-smitten; that an internal tumor had 
even now made such progress in its mastery 
over all his vital forces as to forbid hope of 
his prolonged life, — even in case, as it was 
suggested, the tumor itself were to be re- 

183 



1 84 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

moved by a miracle; that, in fact, the strong 
man, who had hope of long years of life, was 
at that moment, all unconsciously to himself, 
a dying man ; and that now there was noth- 
ing left for him to do but to face death, and 
to prepare for it. 

This sad conclusion of the physicians was 
yet to be made known to the unsuspecting 
patient; and, at the request of the heart- 
bursting wife, a friend of the husband es- 
sayed its communication to him. Already 
the languor of death was slowly creeping over 
the man, who had no thought of dying; but 
he was cheerful and sanguine. After a few 
general words about the state of health of 
the sick man, the friend asked the question 
directly : " If you knew that you were not to 
recover from this illness, is there any busi- 
ness matter that you would like to attend to, 
or any parting word that you would like to 
speak to others?'' "Why, of course, there 
are a good many things that I should like to 
attend to in such a case," was the natural 
answer to this. " Well, from what your phy- 






PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 85 

sician tells me," said the friend, " I think you 
would better attend to those things at once." 
" Perhaps that would be the course of pru- 
dence," was the still unsuspicious response. 
" It is more than a matter of prudence; it is 
a matter of necessity," pressed the friend 
seriously. " If you really think so, I will 
sit up and talk over my business affairs after 
I have had a little nap," said the sick man. 
" My friend," responded the bearer of the sad 
message, " you mustn't take another nap, nor 
wait another hour, before attending to your 
last duties here." And he added seriously, 
and in measured tones, " I mean just what I 
say; for I speak at the request of yoiur phy- 
sician, and he assures me that what you would 
do here you must do very quickly." " I un- 
derstand you now," was then the earnest and 
untremulous response of the surprised, but 
not unready, man, — " I understand you now. 
You mean that I am already dying. I un- 
derstand it now, and it does not disturb me. 
I will rouse right up, and look after matters 
that need my attention." 



1 86 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Then began the busy preparations of the 
now consciously dying man. He was a bank 
president, a railroad president, a Sunday- 
school superintendent. He had large and 
varied interests in other directions also. 
There was much to be done, and a brief 
time for its doing. Calmly and seriously, 
but in cheerfulness and without a show of 
anxiety, he gave directions concerning the 
disposition of his worldly affairs. Then he 
called his loved ones about him, and talked 
with them in cheery tenderness. And so his 
dying hours were passed. His room was a 
place of brightness to the end of his earthly 
course. The fact that he was dying, and 
that he knew that he was dying, only gave 
new seriousness and new efficiency to his 
living while he still was living. So far, that 
Christian business man was an example in 
his living and in his dying. 

It is always a solemn moment when a man 
is told that he is dying. And the solemn 
moment when a man might be told truly that 
he is dying, is always now to any living man ; 



^ 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 87 

for, in the truest and most literal sense, living 
is always dying. No sooner does a man be- 
gin to live than he begins to die. From the 
first hour of his life to its last hour he is 
dying surely and steadily, and it is "only a 
question of time " when his dying shall be 
completed. It is not in the thought of the 
modern poet alone, that 

" Our hearts, though stout and brave, 
Still, like muffled drums, are beating 
Funeral marches to the grave." 

It was wellnigh thirty centuries ago that the 
inspired poet-king of Israel declared, in the 
hour of his vigorous young manhood, "There 
is but a step between me and death." A 
thousand years later, Seneca the wise af- 
firmed: "Daily we die; for daily some por- 
tion of our life is taken from us;" and was it 
an echo of these words of Seneca when Paul 
the apostle said of his ceaseless life-struggle 
in Christ, "I die daily"? 

Yet four centuries after Paul, but still more 
than fourteen centuries ago, Augustine, the 



1 88 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

Christian Father, expanded this thought more 
fully and explicitly. " No sooner do we be- 
gin to live in this dying body," he said, "than 
we begin to move ceaselessly towards death. 
. . . Certainly there is no one who is not 
nearer it this year than last year, and to-mor- 
row than to-day, and to-day than yesterday, 
and a short while hence than now, and now 
than a short while ago. For whatever time 
we live is deducted from our whole term of 
life, and that which remains is daily becom- 
ing less and less; so that our whole life is 
nothing but a race towards death, in which 
no one is allowed to stand still for a little 
space, or to go somewhat more slowly, but 
all are driven forward with an impartial move- 
ment, and with equal rapidity. . . . Further, 
if every man begins to die, that is, is in death 
[is actually dying], as soon as death begins to 
show itself in him (by taking away life, to 
wit; for when life is all taken away, the man 
will be then not in death, but after death), 
then he begins to die so soon as he begins to 
live. ,, Or, as good Bishop Hall has phrased 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 1 89 

it: "Death borders upon our birth, and our 
cradle stands in our grave." 

If, indeed, it be known that a man is pos- 
sessed by a disease that must have a fatal ter- 
mination, it is customary to say of him, " Poor 
man, it is only a: question of time in his case." 
Such a man is recognized as dying while he 
is living. But with what man is it more than 
a mere question of time — as to his dying? 
What man is not at his very birth possessed 
of a physical nature that has in it the seeds 
of decay, of dissolution, of death? What 
man is there of whom it may not be said at 
all times, in sober strictness of truth, " Poor 
man, it is only a question of time in his case " ? 
Every living man is a dying man, dying while 
living, dying because living. He who fails 
to face this truth as a truth, fails of recogniz- 
ing his position as it is with its involvings of 
personal responsibility and of personal duty. 

There are three ways in which to look at 
this very practical paradox, that living is dy- 
ing ; and our highest interests for now and 
for hereafter are involved in the choice which 



190 PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 

we make between these three ways. Men 
may seek to forget or to ignore the fact that 
they are dying. They may feast and jest, 
and may die feasting and jesting. Or, again, 
men may stand appalled and terror-stricken 
at the thought that they are dying; and they 
may refuse to use wisely or cheerfully the 
life that is passing away, just because it is 
passing away. In the one case, their living 
is made worthless by their unmanly trifling. 
In the other case, their living is rendered use- 
less by their unmanly shrinking. In both 
cases, their living and their dying is for 
nought. Yet again, however, men may face 
with serious fearlessness the fact that they 
are dying, and may use their every dying 
moment wisely and to the best advantage. 
They may live, while they live, as those who 
know they are dying, and are making ready 
to die; and they may die, when they die, as 
those who were living to the very latest mo- 
ment of life. Can there be any doubt as to 
which of these three ways is the proper way 
for a Christian believer? 



PRACTICAL PARADOXES. 191 

What added vigor and what added tender- 
ness would accrue to all the acts and words 
of our every living hour, if we were to bear 
in mind unfailingly that every hour is our 
dying hour! If each day we were to do just 
that, and only that, w T hich is befitting a dying 
day, how worthily and how grandly would 
all our time be occupied and employed. If 
every word spoken to a loved one, or to a 
chance acquaintance, w r ere spoken as a dying 
word, as a word which should be remem- 
bered pleasantly by the surviving hearer, 
what deeper meaning and what truer gentle- 
ness would thrill in the tones of the dying 
speaker! Nor would this mode of thought, 
and of the expression of thought, necessarily 
make life less cheerful, while making it more 
earnest. There might well be gladsomeness 
in one's bearing, as he seeks to impress de- 
lightful memories of himself on those whom 
he is never to meet again on earth, or as he 
seeks to improve to the highest his final op- 
portunity of giving help and cheer to his 
fellow-mortal. 



192 PRACTICAL PARADOXES, 

Living is dying; and the truest and noblest 
use of every living hour is to use it as one 
more dying hour. In such a use of every 
hour, while living is dying, dying is also 
fullest and holiest living. 



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